Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
- For a list of comics, see Comics featuring Cueball.
- For the named Cueball, see Rob.
- For Cueball's girlfriend, see Megan.
Cueball is a stick figure character in xkcd. He is distinguished from other characters by having no distinguishing features (including no hair or hat). The name is unofficial but used here. Like other xkcd characters, Cueball doesn't necessarily represent the same character from comic to comic. Instead, he represents a generic everyman. In several comics, there are multiple Cueballs, any of whom can be called Cueball. Early xkcd comics featured Cueball-style characters who occasionally included facial features (e.g., 18: Snapple), since Randall hadn't standardized his character design early in the comic's run. Several of the comics about cancer also have Cueball representing Randall himself.
Name
The character is never actually referred to as Cueball in xkcd; the name was developed by early contributions to explain xkcd. It refers to the visual similarity of Cueball's head to a billiard ball. Randall's transcripts usually refer to the character as "Man 1", and so on, although he has at one time referred to him as not terry in his official transcript for 989: Cryogenics. A few comics give a Cueball character a name, but only one name, Rob, appears several times (13 in total) for a Cueball. The debate mentioned above was mainly about whether all other Cueballs should be retroactively renamed "Rob". Following the same logic that resulted in the "Cutie" character (the female version of Cueball) being renamed Megan, an argument can be advanced for renaming Cueball as Rob. As it stands, however, it seems the community has not agreed with this logic, with an argument against the name change being the abundance of comics with multiple Cueballs.
