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The audience for webcomics as an art form can be somewhat insular, as webcomics are primarily made by geeks for geeks and if you don’t know arcane quotes of video game dialogue or math-based puns you’re probably not going to get them. (Although that’s starting to change with comics like Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, which generally only requires a basic knowledge of Western literature and history, or Chicagoan John Campbell’s Pictures for Sad Children, which only requires a basic knowledge of clinical depression and crippling existential angst.) Randall Munroe describes his strip xkcd as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” and although the math-based stuff pretty frequently goes over my head there’s enough universal stuff delivered so perfectly and simply—visually Munroe rarely reaches for anything over stick-figure level—that it could potentially resonate with a large crossover audience.
