Comics As Medium

I was delighted to read about Google’s new web browser, Google Chrome, the other day. Delighted because Chrome promises to improve on the already-good experience of browsing with Firefox; delighted because Chrome is going to be open source, and thus contributing to the greater development of the web user interface; and delighted because all its complexities were explored through a comic by Scott McCloud.
Comics people and communications people will already know McCloud as the author of Understanding Comics, the best single explanation for how the comics medium works, and easily the most influential comics textbook around. It helped that McCloud wrote it as a comic, of course. While wiser people than I have challenged some of his interpretations and claims, this was still an astonishingly sound discussion of what comics means, and what happens when you stick words and pictures on a page together.
The usefulness of comics as an explanatory tool has been well-known for decades. The comics medium is particularly good for explaining complex topics, and what McCloud and the Google Chrome team have done here is nothing short of masterful. With deft use of images and placement, and no doubt some very careful editing of the words, some very complex engineering is rendered comprehensible to the average reader. It is a remarkable feat in and of itself, and I am impressed also by the marketing angle – that the way they decided to talk up Google Chrome was to get an awareness of the technical advancements out to a general readership. Other neat aspects – the fact that the comic is narrated by comic versions of the actual Google Chrome designers, for instance – build on this. I don’t think you can avoid coming out well-disposed towards the project at the end of reading this book, and considering how the usual general response* to a new technology announcement is either apathy or cynicism, that’s quite something. As far as I’m concerned, its a triumph of the comics medium. So, well done Google, and well done Scott McCloud. Consider me sold.
You can read some of McCloud’s fiction comics work online, as well: Zot: Hearts and Minds.
* I am, of course, generalising madly from personal experience here…