Randall Munroe’s xkcd broke many of the rules cartoonists of the time had accepted. It was a viral hit that thrived on the internet it joined, despite basic stick-figure art, varying and esoteric subject matter, and few recurring characters. Munroe’s approach crystallized into a recognizable style over the years, but nothing except that style held xkcd together. Most of its installments were simple, but they could, without warning, grow ambitious.
Most ambitious by far was “Time,” a story told in 2013 over 3099 frames, released on a half-hour schedule for five days and then an hourly one for another 118 (nearly four months).
“Time” begins with a man and woman building a sand castle, a simple metaphor for our brief human lives—no matter how impressive a tower we make, the sea, like time itself, will erode it down to nothing. When the story was first released, I knew Randall and his then-fiancee were facing a cancer diagnosis, so it was easy to assume mortality was on his mind.
I didn’t think more of these early frames than that. (Below, frames #1, #2, #50, and #100.)
I lost track of “Time” (heh) somewhere around here. In my defense, new installments of xkcd pushed “Time” off the homepage about then. If I’d been tracking webcomics news then, though, I’d have seen that “Time” was winning awards: it had much more to offer than an extended sand castle metaphor. Munroe’s couple start to wonder about what the shoreline is doing, in a way ex-NASA scientist Munroe and his scientist partner would not:
Munroe’s characters sometimes feign ignorance for the sake of a punchline, but this isn’t that. These two genuinely don’t know whether there’s more than one river in the world. Or why the water is rising faster now. Not only is this not Randall and his partner, this isn’t our world—or it’s far enough in our future that nothing can be taken for granted.
Full of desire to understand, the two leave their beach and set out for the mountains. There’s more I could tell you, but that’d spoil the pleasure of discovering it yourself—and despite its ominous rising waters, pleasure is what the story has to offer.
Only a few frames are available on xkcd now, but Randall points to this site, which offers multiple tools to get through the epic. You can set the interface to “play” frames at different speeds, with longer pauses for dialogue. Or you can keep hitting the single-arrow button, or your keyboard’s arrow keys, to make your way through. (If you really want the setting and the science behind it explained, go here.)
One more note to would-be readers: the panels with dialogue get talkier toward the end, and one key scene uses a deliberate effect that makes some dialogue hard to follow (see below). I started reading it at one frame per second with a four-second pause for frames of dialogue. With the last few hundred frames, I had to adjust that pace, and occasionally pause or go back. Still, all that was easy to do.
Incidentally, Munroe’s fiancee, now his wife, beat the odds. Though Munroe doesn’t share many details online about their shared life, he published strips charting their progress at the two-year mark, the seven-year mark, and in 2020, the ten-year mark. And while “Time” shows we can’t always assume who xkcd’s stick figures represent, every so often an update seems to feature the two of them, exploring the present-day world with the same energy as their lookalikes: