Comics About Code: The Real Work Isn’t the Drawing
People often assume that making a good programming comic comes down to either having the right hardware or being naturally gifted at illustration. In practice, neither is the bottleneck. The same comic can be produced with a tablet and stylus or with a grainy photo of a notebook taken on a phone. The hard part is deciding what to say and how to structure it so that a reader with no prior context can follow along.
Most effective programming comics fall into one of three broad categories. The lines between them aren't precise, but they provide a useful framework for thinking about the craft.
Category One: The Surprising Fact
These comics present an idea that flips a common assumption or illuminates something hidden. Examples include the fact that SELECT queries aren't executed in the order they're written, that position: absolute isn't actually absolute, or that container layers are implemented using overlay filesystems. Some of these are mundane to experienced developers—cookies letting a server store information in a browser is a basic fact—but to someone encountering the concept for the first time, it's surprising and exciting.
There are two useful subtypes here. The first is the practical fact: something you can do with a tool, like using ngrep to search network packets. The second is the explanatory fact: it clarifies why a tool behaves the way it does, such as understanding that a git branch is just a pointer to a commit. Both serve the same core purpose of reframing something familiar into a moment of insight.
Category Two: The Curated List
On the surface, this sounds mundane. Yet some of the most praised comics are lists. The key distinction is that they aren't exhaustive enumerations but rather compilations of the most important items on a given topic. Take grep: it has dozens of command-line arguments, but only nine get used regularly, and each one can be explained in a sentence. Similar treatment works for HTTP request headers, status codes, or the contents of a good one-on-one meeting with your manager.
These lists derive their value from curation and specificity. Topics like "HTTP request headers" or "HTTP response headers" are narrow enough that a short visual format can cover them without becoming a wall of text.
Category Three: The Relatable Story
A third type of comic touches on experiences that resonate widely: taking on difficult projects, improving at debugging, or the perpetual underestimation of how long data analysis will take. These stories don't follow the same formula as the other two categories and are harder to codify, but they address the emotional side of working with technology.
Where Surprising Facts Come From
Finding surprising facts to share is a skill that develops with practice. One reliable starting point is to document things you yourself recently learned. If a fact surprises you, there's a strong chance others will find value in it too. This begins as a habit of writing things down—whether in a blog post or notes—and over time, you improve at noticing what's worth capturing and explaining it clearly.
The harder version of this task is identifying facts that would surprise people who are new to a topic, even when the fact no longer surprises you. The main technique for this is conversation. When you walk through a task with a coworker or a friend and they react with "wait, you can do that?"—that's a signal. The SQL execution order example came from just such an interaction; the fact was intuitive to the person explaining it but genuinely eye-opening to the listener. This skill of sensing what confuses other people and crafting clear explanations is, in essence, the skill of teaching.
Lists Are Easier to Execute, Harder to Scope
For lists, the effort goes into picking the topic. Once the scope is set—say, every Linux networking tool you know—the format almost writes itself. You enumerate the items and give a brief description of each. The challenge is a different one: finding a subject where "the most important things" are few enough in number and concise enough in explanation to fit a comic.
Only Write About What You Already Know
A frequent question is whether comics are written about topics in the middle of the learning process. They are not. Short-form writing is much harder than long-form. A blog post can include basic facts, open questions, and examples even when the author is still confused. A comic, by contrast, requires you to declare definitively that these are the few most critical facts about a topic. If you're still learning, you likely haven't identified those facts yet. The clarity required for a concise format means you need to be well past the confusion stage before you start drawing.
