Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
- For a list of comics, see Comics featuring Barrel Boy.
- For the comic series, see The Boy and his Barrel.
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This explanation is incomplete:
- The description of Barrel Boy needs to be simplified a bit.
- Mention that he's one of the few (or the only?) character that's not a stick figure.
- Mention his similarity to the boy in 39: Bowl. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!
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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. 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.
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. 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.
