Barrel Boy

Barrel Boy
First appearance	1: Barrel - Part 1
Appearances	4

For a list of comics, see Comics featuring Barrel Boy.

For the comic series, see The Boy and his Barrel.

Barrel Boy is a character in xkcd. He only appears in the The Boy and his Barrel series, an early six-comic story whose parts were randomly published during the first several dozen strips. He's one of the few characters that's not a stick figure. The last image on the what if? article Niagara Straw features Beret Guy riding in a barrel, which may be a reference to Barrel Boy.

I've never referred to the boy in the barrel as "Barrel Lad" -- that seems to have started in this [Wikipedia] article. I've called him "Barrel boy" or "The boy in the barrel". Minor detail, but it's funny how sometimes something can appear on Wikipedia, get referenced in other places, and then Wikipedia cites those other places as supporting references. Hooray Wikiality!

—Randall Munroe, Source

Barrel Boy is very different from what would quickly become the xkcd stick figure style, since he has a face and a human-like body, albeit simplified. He is recognised as his own character, distinct from even the earliest Cueball stick figure, by both a great gulf of style and by personality. Though the artistic development of style from cartoonish-realism to barebones-stickfigurey might well have included a 'missing link' or two of Barrel Boy 'growing up' into the author-avatar/Rob, the debut to the world (in either its pre-website order, or numbered as per xkcd.com) intermingles the two stages of evolution in a way that at least makes it clear that Randall considers them parallel art styles, not sequential.

There are theories that this character is who grows up to be Beret Guy, while one could perhaps also directly link with Jack and Jill, which pops up years later, infrequently as contrast to the contemporary Cueballs/other adults. He is very similar to the character in 39: Bowl, however, the original title text states "This is not the barrel boy".