The Chrome comic

Google's Chrome browser will succeed if we understand it, like it and use it. And before the browser even appears, the company has taken a masterful step to achieving that.

I'm talking about the Chrome comic. As Rupert says, it's splendid - and it illustrates what Google is about on more than just the pictorial level.

Google says it's rethought the browser, according to the way people use the Internet, and how computers operate. And the comic actually explains what they mean, and explains it so well that its 38-pages are a pleasure to read.

And - of course! - it's issued under the creative commons licence, too. That's how it got online.

The comic is the work of Scott McCloud, genius of simply-drawn comics, pioneer of web comics, and a leading theorist/practitioner on how comics work.

McCloud wrote (and of course drew) the best book about the graphical language of comics (Understanding Comics, 1994), and made the much-loved series Zot!, among lots of other things.

McCloud is obviously on-message here, turning interviews with Google staff into marketing material, but he's grasping the ideas, playing with them and showing them to us.

Like the best of open source, this comic involves the user/reader.

Compare that to Microsoft's Heroes Happen Here comic for Silverlight. That was lame, and required a pointless proprietary program to read it. We laughed.