2: Petit Trees (sketch)

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 19:15, 19 August 2012 by Blaisepascal (talk | contribs) (Added explanation, and trail through the LJ comics.)
Jump to: navigation, search
Petit Trees (sketch)
"Petit" being a reference to Le Petit Prince, which I only thought about halfway through the sketch
Title text: "Petit" being a reference to Le Petit Prince, which I only thought about halfway through the sketch

Explanation

Le Petit Prince was a novella written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943, about the titular "little Prince", who lives on an asteroid and visits other inhabited asteroids and eventually the Earth. The book is filled with drawings of the asteroid, the prince, and the travels they make. The scale of the asteroid is such that, if two large trees grew on it, it would look a lot like this sketch.

Transcript

[Two trees are growing on opposite sides of a sphere.]

Trivia

  • Originally posted at Randall's livejournal site
  • [Quote from Randall] "Another fairly old drawing that I scanned"
  • Original title "Le Petit"
  • This is the fourth comic posted on livejournal. The previous was xkcd 3, the next was xkcd 1


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

Randall says that he only thought of the reference to Le Petit Prince while he was drawing this picture. I think that it is likely that Randall was originally thinking of "pedigrees" and the tree structure of a genealogical chart. Since royalty is often descended from earlier royal ancestors, it would not be surprising that while drawing what was originally a pun, Randall thought of the book "Le Petit Prince." 162.158.123.79 16:55, 15 November 2019 (UTC)