It shouldn’t really be possible to make something as universal as stick figures your trademark, but I’ve been reading Randall Munroe’s ‘xkcd’ for so long that when I see someone else doing stick figures, I now automatically consider them to be pastiching ‘xkcd’.

Which makes no sense at all; unlike the stick men of ‘Cyanide and Happiness’ with their leering slash-mouths, there’s nothing distinct about Munroe’s stickmen: they’re just stickmen. But nonetheless Munroe has made them synonymous with ‘xkcd’.

It helps that the strip combines very straightforward figures with an eclectic combination of subjects. The tagline describes ‘xkcd’ as ‘a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language’, but it darts off on all manner of other scientific and geeky tangents (as well as some surprisingly NSFW diagrams – office workers beware).

It’s hard to imagine anyone beyond Munroe getting every single gag here, but the simplicity of presentation and the thrice-weekly updates mean that hardly matters – if you don’t like one strip, there’s another coming soon enough.

‘xkcd’ has taken the most generic style of drawing and created something unique with it. Go figure.