Re: Google Doc in Comic Book Form

[Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com>]

On Sep 2, 2008, at 12:29 PM, jlshaeffer -at- aol -dot- com wrote:
>
>  Looking closely, I see that the comic is divided into topic  
> sections (indicated by tabs at the top of pages 1, 3, 12, 18, 25  
> and 34). If you blink you can easily miss this structure (I did the  
> first time through the book). The tabs are not linked or assembled  
> into a TOC anywhere, but the structure is there.

The original comic was designed to be printed and mailed out in  
hardcopy.  It was scanned and uploaded overnight
and the versions that have appeared on the net have been simply a  
series of JPGs (or a PDF of same).  The blogoscoped version just  
provides links to the pages as a rudimentary TOC.

It should be noted, however, that this format is typical of McCloud's  
work.  It's very narrative, intended for reading
straight through, with not a lot of reference points at all.   
Understanding Comics -- as completely brilliant as it
is, and great fun to read -- is barely navigable in any form other  
than straight through.  No chapter headings or index, only a  
rudimentary TOC on the first page.  Information retrieval is not high  
up on the priority list for Scott McCloud's art and writing style.

As to the actual Chrome comic, well....for me it suffers not only  
from McCloud's structure peculiarities but also from
a difficult script.  I don't know what the collaborative process was  
between McCloud and the Google engineers but McCloud says on his home  
page the the engineers wrote most of the script (the credits at the  
end say that too).   Yeah, I can see that.  The script has a lot of  
the qualities of not-very-good engineering writing: dense, product- 
focussed, jargon-laden, unsure of its audience, and poorly structured.

McCloud does a really great job at explaining and illustrating  
difficult concepts in his own work.  In this comic there are lovely  
moments of instructional design and illustration here and there, and  
using the real engineers to describe their work puts a human touch on  
dry subjects.  But when the writing got especially dense, or when the  
writing and art seemed to disconnect (here is a random blob, with a  
hat!), I lost interest, I got bored, I skipped around.  This comic  
didn't draw me in, teach me, leave me with the same sense of clarity  
over sandboxing and garbage collection that I get with many of the  
visual and sequential art concepts from McCloud's own work.  At the  
end I was left feeling like I had just clicked through a really  
nicely illustrated powerpoint presentation.

Mostly I'm left with a kind of letdown feeling that this could have  
been so much better.   McCloud is great at what he does but this  
isn't really the sort of thing that he does.  It is astonishing and  
impressive that Google hired Scott McCloud to do this work at all,  
and obviously they got tremendous press from it.  But I keep thinking  
that if only there had been a great script writer at Google  
collaborating with McCloud, someone with both technical and comics  
experience, who had been better at focussing the technical concepts,  
at condensing and structuring the content, at adding metaphor and  
pacing, then this could truly have been something really exciting in  
instructional design.  I feel like it was a big missed opportunity.

Laura
comics geek


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Laura Lemay     Killer of Trees     lemay % lne.com    lemay % gmail.com
http://www.lauralemay.com                     http://blog.lauralemay.com
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