"Creator of xkcd Reveals Secret Backstory of His Epic 3,099-Panel Comic"

From Wired:

When xkcd creator Randall Munroe first posted a new installment of his webcomic titled “Time” on March 25, it looked deceptively simple: a picture of two black and white stick figures, a man and a woman, sitting wordlessly on the ground. There was no story, no punchline, no words. 30 minutes later, the image changed; the figures shifted slightly. And they continued to change every half-hour for the next week–and every hour for months after that–slowly coalescing into a story as the two characters discovered disturbing changes in the landscape around them, and set out on an epic, time-lapsed journey to discover the truth about what was happening to their world.

Readers set out on a similar journey, although their path led not to the wild unknown, but rather back to the same URL where the mystery continued to unfold hour by hour. Who were these characters? Where were they? What did the story mean? Munroe offered no direct answers, instead seeding the panels with esoteric clues from botany, astronomy and geology. Soon, “Time” had developed a fanatical following that pored over every update pixel by pixel and gathered online to trade theories, decipher clues, and even write songs....The rest of the story