Google Chrome

Google, September 2008.

This is an educational (non-fictional) comic sent to journalists and bloggers as part of the release of the Google Chrome browser. The comic explains the inner workings of their, then new, open source browser.

Scott McCloud (best known for his book Understanding Comics from 1993) adapted information from a number of Google engineers into this 38 page comic book, providing all the layout, art and lettering.

Apparently Google's mailroom accidentally shipped some copies out too early to Europe, some of those copies were scanned and excerpts made it onto the internet. As a result Google decided to bring the release of the browser forward one day to Tuesday, September 2nd.

Soon after the release a few websites started producing parodies of some of the pages of the comic book - a couple of examples are shown above next to the original.

Copies of this comic are pretty hard to find, maybe in part due to the original audience of the comic not being comic collectors hence copies could have been filed and forgotten and many may have been put in the trash.