OPEN

…then I’ve got a couple of treats for you.

I loved the Google Chrome comic book that the company sent out (prematurely) to press and bloggers to promote its new browser, Chrome.

I basically loved it on a couple of levels:

1. What a perfect way to describe the complex technical features of a piece of software in a way that people other than hardcore techies, that the wider geekery would grasp.

It’s perfect – a thousand more times wonderful and optimised for viral / word-of-mouth, by dint of being original, lovely, something you would want to talk about and pass on. The classic social object, of Hugh MacLeod’s thinking.

2. I also love it because I’d never heard of Scott McCloud, and I now I’ve started reading some of his work online. It’s very good indeed…

Have a look at The Right Number his online graphic novel “about math, sex, obsession and phone numbers”. It uses a really cool format where each frame of the story is embedded in the centre of the previous one, so you click on the frame in the centre to see it.

3. I’d recently rediscovered my love of comics after making a couple myself for friends. Using the incredible Comic Life I’d converted a stack of photos that would have been nice on their own into a fun comic book format. As fun to make as to read, as Comic Life pulls off that brilliant trick of realising a non-expert’s creative idea in no time at all.

In seconds I was able to work out how to start using the templates, the pick-up-and-drop speech bubbles and “sound effect” captions…

It’s incredible and I highly recommend downloading and buying a comic to see if you can’t use it yourself for home or – dare I say it – work. Google may have done its thing with comic artist auteur Scott McCloud, but what of photo stories – there’s something in it I tell you…

Worth a try. What I found is that with so many templates to choose from the language of graphic novels and comics – which I’ve read few of since my very early twenties (I read a hell of a lot before then) – just started coming back to me. Even though I’d never designed one before, it just felt easy and natural somehow. And lots and lots of fun… I will find a way of using this at work sometime soon. Just you wait.

Or maybe start Brighton Daily Photo Story, a companion to m’coleague Dean Harvey’s Brighton Daily Photo?

And the filter that lets you turn photos into graphic novel-like illustrations was the most fun of all…

Anyway, here’s a couple of the less legally challenging pages of from one of them Stag Man: A (Needlessly) Graphic Novel: