On June 16th, 2008, I started hiding an X in every comic. Why? Well, before Kenny Chronicles started, I was also considering making a puzzle book where you have to find a little X in a complex scene. This was inspired by the image to the right(or above, if you’re reading this in an rss reader that ignores positioning), an image that has been around the web for a while. The puzzle book idea quickly fell by the wayside.

Then 3.5 months into the comic, I decided to hide 8 ninjas in a comic because that’s what ninjas do. I figured that if I am hiding things all over a comic, I might as well throw in one more thing to find.

My comics at that time often used cross-hatching, so that made it fairly easy to camouflage the X in with the lines, and I decided to make the hidden X a regular thing. I always used the exact same size, color and font for the X so there would be no mistaking if you found the X or not, although it kinda got distorted in the next comic(bottome of the exclamation points), then shrunk in the comic after that(dead guy’s eye), and the Doggone Dailies Of Summer that year changed the colors to match the lines(The title image at the beginning of the Doggone Dailies doesn’t have one because I didn’t consider it a comic). I tried to hide it in places where your eyes would either never focus on or where it matches some intersecting lines. I never made mention of it, I wanted readers to discover it on their own. I’ve been hiding an X in every single comic since then.

It got harder to hide those X’s once I switched to 3D backgrounds(they kinda rely on cross-hatching and inked backgrounds), but I wanted to keep consistent with it. The hidden X’s are yet another reason to start fresh with a new comic. I can change anything I want because it’s an entirely different archive.

While I’m sure others have noticed little X’s here and there, the first time anybody actually mentioned it was on July 20th, 2011… just over 3 years later. The honor goes to Ghost_of_StarmanDX on FurAffinity, who apparently is also JA_of_MN here on the Kenny comments. Ghost made the comment on July 18th’s comic over on FurAffinity here, then commented about it on the next comic a day later here on kennychronicles.com. The only other person to mention it was Miles, who commented on JA’s comment.

I’ve been waiting a long time to mention those X’s, and now that you know about them, you can go back through the archives and try to find them ALL!…… if you’re a masochist. Seriously, don’t try to find them all. It would be too frustrating and you can’t even brag about it in the comments because the comments close automatically on old comics. Just be on the lookout for them the next time you do browse the archives and revel in the math-geekiness of it all. You found X.