Google has chosen cartoonist Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain the Internet giant’s new browser known as “Chrome.”  McCloud has produced a 38-page comic detailing the features of the new browser that Google is introducing in an effort to forestall any attempt by Microsoft, which is shaping up as Google’s chief rival in the Internet realm, to limit access to Google for those using Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer browser.  McCloud’s Chrome comic is not a Webcomic, though it is available for reading online.  It was created as a pamphlet (and can be easily downloaded) to explain Google’s entry into the browser market to journalists and bloggers.

McCloud, as usual, manages to explain the inner workings of the Chrome browser in a straightforward visual way that should make this 38-page comic a “must-read” for techies as well as for ordinary Internet users (with PCs, since there is no Mac version of Chrome yet), who will be able to understand the basic concept behind Google’s new V8 javascript engine, but who will probably be much more interested in the security aspects of the new browser, which includes a “privacy mode” that creates an “incognito window” where nothing that occurs is ever logged on the user’s computer, as well as powerful new protection against “malware” that wants to take over your machine.

Informative and didactic comics such as McCloud’s explication of the new Chrome browser are commonplace in Japan, and were also quite prevalent in this country in previous eras such as World War II.  The fact that Google, the leading corporate champion of the Internet age, chose to use a comic book to introduce and explain its new browser is further verification of the growing influence of comics and of the growing recognition of the comics medium’s powerful pedagogic potential.