xkcd Comics Scraper 🖊️

Scrape xkcd comics into clean, structured JSON — title, alt text (the mouseover joke), image URL, transcript and publication date — with no API key, no login, and no browser. The Actor talks directly to xkcd's official, public JSON API, so it is fast, reliable, and datacenter-proxy friendly (you don't need residential proxies).

Grab the latest N comics, a hand-picked list of numbers, or an entire range — up to 1,000 comics per run.

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✨ Features

• Clean JSON output — one tidy record per comic, every field nullable and predictable.
• Alt text included — the famous xkcd hover/title-text joke, which most scrapers miss.
• Transcript field — community transcript text where available (great for NLP / search).
• Three modes — latest, comics (specific numbers), range.
• ISO dates — xkcd's split year/month/day is normalised to YYYY-MM-DD.
• Handles comic #404 gracefully — that comic intentionally does not exist and is skipped, not fatal.
• No API key, no proxies required — runs cheaply on the free/starter plan.

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🚀 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	latest, comics, or range.
latestCount	integer	For latest: how many recent comics (default 20).
numbers	array	For comics: e.g. [353, 1234].
fromNum	integer	For range: first comic number (inclusive).
toNum	integer	For range: last comic number (inclusive).
maxItems	integer	Hard cap per run (default 100, max 1000).

Example — latest 20 comics

{ "mode": "latest", "latestCount": 20 }

Example — specific comics

{ "mode": "comics", "numbers": [353, 1234, 936] }

Example — a range

{ "mode": "range", "fromNum": 1, "toNum": 100, "maxItems": 100 }

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📦 Output

Each dataset item:

{
  "num": 353,
  "title": "Python",
  "alt": "I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday.  It was wonderful.  Perl, I'm leaving you.",
  "img": "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.png",
  "date": "2007-12-05",
  "transcript": "[[ A stick figure is floating in the sky ]] ...",
  "url": "https://xkcd.com/353/",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-18T08:00:00+00:00"
}

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💸 Pricing

This Actor is lightweight — it hits a plain JSON endpoint per comic, so runs are cheap. As a rule of thumb, expect roughly ~$0.50 per 1,000 comics in platform usage, depending on your plan and memory settings. Small runs (the latest 20) cost a fraction of a cent.

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🎯 Use cases

• Content & newsletters — embed the latest comic, alt text and link automatically.
• NLP / ML datasets — build a labelled corpus of captions, alt text and transcripts for text analysis, humour research, or embeddings.
• Fan apps & bots — power a "random xkcd" Slack/Discord bot, a widget, or a mobile app.
• Archiving — snapshot the full xkcd back-catalogue with stable image URLs and metadata.

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🆚 Why this Actor?

	This Actor	Manual scraping	RSS feed
Alt text (hover joke)	✅	⚠️ fragile HTML parsing	❌
Transcript	✅	⚠️	❌
Specific numbers / ranges	✅	⚠️	❌ latest only
ISO dates	✅	❌	⚠️
No proxies needed	✅	depends	✅

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🔗 Related Actors

• Rick and Morty Scraper
• Pokémon Scraper
• Wikipedia Scraper
• Reddit Scraper

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Keywords: xkcd scraper, xkcd api, webcomic scraper, comic scraper, alt text, comic transcript, nlp dataset, randall munroe, geek humor, comic archive.