Category:Checkered paper

Many of the first comics were simply sketches drawn by Randall on the paper he had at hand, (sometimes during a class or a lecture). They were often scanned much later and posted on LiveJournal. Several of these sketched were drawn on checkered paper (coarse-grid graph paper): these are included in this category.

Among the 41 comics posted on LiveJournal before xkcd.com, 35 were drawn on checkered paper. The one which ended up with the highest number on xkcd.com is 44: Love, released on LiveJournal on October 19, 2005. However, 39: Bowl was released about two weeks later, on December 5, 2005, and is thus the last LiveJournal comic drawn on checkered paper. For more information, see LiveJournal.

After the new site opened on January 1, 2006, three new comics drawn on checkered paper were released. The first two were released on the first day of xkcd.com and the third was inserted a few months later. 12: Poisson and 5: Blown apart were exclusively published on the first day of xkcd.com and were never posted on LiveJournal. 36: Scientists was instead initially published as a duplicate of comic 10: Pi Equals. Over three months after the original posting, Randall noticed the error and corrected it sometime between April 23, 2006 and July 5, 2006, when the updated version appeared in the Web Archive. He likely found an old drawing that was never meant for publication and used it instead, so it wouldn't appear out of place among the other comics from that period. Since these three were the last checkered-paper comics to be released, 36: Scientists is the last comic to ever come out on this type of paper.

In 2012, Randall revived the blue grid as the background for his blog what if?, but the site was redesigned in 2022. This is what the site looked like before the redesign, which removed the background image in favour of a simple color.