Are you ready to rock? We’ve already received quite a few submissions from Seattle-area musicians in the tech and life sciences community who want to compete in the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The big competition is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Ale House on July 30. (Event details and band application info is here; the deadline for applicants is June 12.)

But we also got a submission we didn’t expect. It looks like tech luminaries Bill Gates and Paul Allen, a known music buff, are planning to enter the competition—at least in one alternate reality. Donn Harvey, the president of Bellevue, WA-based Protingent Staffing (and bass guitarist with Hettel Street Blues), sent us a rather unusual e-mail. It seems his company has a comic-strip superhero who works with Gates and Allen.

I’ll let the cartoons, drawn by David J. Locher, tell the rest of the story (see below):

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(To be continued…)

OK, so it’s a little self-promotional (for both of us), but we laughed out loud when we received it. Besides, it’s all in the spirit of fun and a great cause, right? We’ll be announcing the judges and prizes for the Battle soon. In the meantime, please help us spread the word, and e-mail us at techbands@xconomy.com if your band would like to enter.

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Issaquah, WA-based Amazing Society, a game development studio owned by San Mateo, CA-based Gazillion Entertainment, is making a video game based on the Super Hero Squad cartoon, through a partnership between Gazillion and Marvel Entertainment. Gazillion emerged from stealth mode this week, as reported by VentureBeat and Northwest Innovation. Amazing Society is slated to develop two other massively multiplayer online games as well.

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Over the last week, I’ve had several people tell me that the most interesting thing about Google Chrome isn’t the browser itself, but the way Google chose to present it to the world: via a comic book. Indeed, for at least a day or two, Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic—which was accidentally leaked to journalists over the Labor Day weekend, before Google’s official release of the software—was the only information available about the project. Which meant that thousands of Internet users, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives, found themselves reading an extended comic—a genre familiar to millions of adult manga readers in Japan but still mainly relegated to the kids’ sections of U.S. bookstores.

I wondered aloud in a column last week whether all that exposure might help put the comic genre back on the map as a vehicle for serious fiction and non-fiction work. On Monday, I got a chance to put that question to Scott McCloud himself. The author of a bestselling trilogy of comic books about the comic genre’s history, future, and practice—Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006)—McCloud is both the profession’s leading theoretician and one of its most versatile practitioners. He’s also a true geek, and has had his eye on the Web for more than a decade, writing and drawing about its potential as the medium for a new generation of comics that would be liberated from the printed page by emerging interface paradigms such as hyperlinking, zooming, and scrolling.

At its most basic, after all, a comic is just a sequence of pictures that tells a story. And computers and the Web offer many new ways to create and arrange these sequences and to move from panel to panel—they supply what McCloud called, in Reinventing Comics, an “infinite canvas.” Which helps explain how Google was able to interest McCloud in the Chrome project. McCloud says, as you’ll read below, that one of the aesthetic ideas driving the Chrome developers (though this idea didn’t make it into his 38-page comic about the browser) was to “sweep the path clean”—essentially, to get out of the way of content developers and Web users by reducing the software’s onscreen footprint, as well as its functional bells and whistles, to the bare minimum. That’s music to the ears of an artist like McCloud.

Here’s the full text of our interview.

Xconomy: Tell me how the comic came about. How did Google get you on board, and how did you do the research and gather the visual materials you needed?

Scott McCloud: I was first approached by Eric Antonow at Google. He had actually had me out to speak at the Googleplex in August of 2007, during the tour for Making Comics, my last book. He knew that Chrome was coming up—they had been working on it for a year and a half —and he had a sense that comics might be a good way to help explain the project.

But beyond that, it really only took shape when I came up to the campus and we started brainstorming about it. This was Eric, and another Googler, Anna-Christina Douglas, and we were joined by a third, Mark Sabec. In brainstorming we considered a lot of possible forms. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if it would be print or online. We didn’t know what sort of length. We weren’t sure what the focus would be. But gradually we came to agreement on what would be an effective strategy.

And then the research was primarily these video interviews that we did with about 20 engineers. These were substantial interviews, running on average about 30 to 40 minutes, some longer. And they had markers and a whiteboard and would occasionally use it, but that was about it for visuals. It was mostly just these explanations, which we then culled through and tried to find a common narrative. I took this sort of raw transcript and pared it down. But [it was] still pretty rough around the edges. And I tried to pound it into a coherent, connected story and then make it visual.

X: You must have had to wait around for the developers to finish certain things about the look and feel of Chrome before you could represent it in the comic.

SM: There were only one or two visual elements that we were hanging on—one or two icons that changed. But for the most part, its shape was concrete enough that I was able to work concurrently in that last couple of months. For example, they knew the shape of the tabs. I wasn’t drawing screen-shot-level detail. My cartoon version of Chrome was …Next Page »

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While the tech-blog world is exhausting itself testing and writing about Google Chrome, the new open-source Web browser released by the search giant on Tuesday, I’m still just having fun paging back and forth through the 38-page Scott McCloud Web comic that Google commissioned to explain the whole project. A lot of Silicon Valley companies, when they’re launching big new products, will rent a hotel ballroom, erect a glitzy set, and invite a bunch of journalists and pundits to a scripted dog-and-pony show. Chrome’s launch may mark the first time in history that a company simply hired a comic book artist instead.

Google couldn’t have found a likelier candidate than McCloud, who is the author of Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006), and has written (or should I say drawn?) extensively about how the Web is expanding the boundaries of comics as a genre. It’s a perfect pairing to see McCloud—who has done comics on topics as technical as the constraints imposed on digital-comics authors by HTML tables—writing about something as fundamental to the Web as the browser itself.

If you haven’t heard the story behind Chrome already, it’s Google’s attempt to update the very notion of the Web browser—which was, after all, invented 15 years ago—to reflect the realities of the Web 2.0 era. These days, if you’re on the Web, chances are you’re interacting with an application rather than simply consuming content. “People are watching and loading videos, chatting with each other, playing Web-based games…all these things that didn’t exist when browsers were first created,” Google software engineer Pam Greene points out in McCloud’s comic. (She’s one of the many Googlers whose words McCloud drew upon for the comic. His drawings of her remind me a lot of the Jodie/Julie character in McCloud’s terrific experimental Web comic, The Right Number.) Chrome is designed to make such applications run faster and more reliably, and to protect users and their computers in the process—in part, by separating the activity occurring on each open browser tab into its own process, as if it were a separate program. (As McCloud explains, current browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox attend to the scripts running in each tab one at a time, moving between them serially—which is why the more tabs you have open, the slower your browser gets.)

I won’t go into the real details—plenty of other bloggers and journalists have done that this week. What’s amazing about McCloud’s Web comic is that he’s able to distill some fairly high-level points about things like multi-process architecture, memory fragmentation, rendering engines, virtual machines, hidden class transitions in Javascript, and incremental garbage collection into a few panels in a comic, and make it all feel fun and non-threatening. Take it from a longtime technology writer: explaining a new technology’s significance while getting the details right and keeping it all accessible to your Aunt Mae is a difficult feat. But a lot of us tech journalists could take lessons from McCloud, who doesn’t bring in a concept unless he can clarify through a clever combination of graphics, iconography, and text.

So, a lot of what I’m saying here boils down to one craftsman admiring another. Envying, even: the comic medium gives McCloud access to a lot of visual devices and idioms that are denied to us lowly copywriters. One of McCloud’s frequent tricks is to make the Google engineers part of the very diagrams he uses to explain Chrome’s new features. Every time you open a blank tab, for example, Chrome populates it with small, clickable tiles representing your most-visited Web pages (the program figures that you were probably on your way to one of those pages anyway). To explain what’s happening on this page, McCloud puts a couple of Googlers inside the tiles, not unlike those washed-up actors who used to appear on Hollywood Squares. In other places, the Google guides are climbing around on flow-chart boxes or perched on the borders of the comic’s panels.

Given how long McCloud has been working on various forms of Web comics and how popular his books have been, it’s odd that his example hasn’t caught on more widely. It’s true that traditional comic publishers like Marvel are finally using Flash and other Web-based technologies to put their classic superhero comics online. And in the non-Web world, comics and graphic novels are still in the midst of a renaissance that’s been underway for more than a decade now, even crossing over into film (e.g., 2003’s American Splendor, based on the comic books of Harvey Pekar). But I don’t have the sense that many comic artists are creating the kinds of new Web-based experiences McCloud was hoping they would back in 2000-20001, when he published “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” a series of Web comics that continued the themes in Reinventing Comics—especially, his speculations about the future of digital comics.

In one great strip from “I Can’t Stop Thinking,” for example, McCloud examined how the endlessly scrolling nature of a Web page—he called it the “infinite canvas”—might allow comic artists to play with reader’s expectations about the sequential nature of comics, perhaps by connecting panels via unconventional types of lines, links, paths, or trails. The Right Number used a unique zooming interface to get from one panel to the next—and this idea has found an unlikely reincarnation in the form of Seadragon, an experimental Microsoft program that uses zooming to ease the navigation of massive amounts of graphical information. But while software engineers and information architects may be busy experimenting in these directions, I’m not aware of a lot of artists who are.

Perhaps Web comics aren’t flowering (outside of McCloud’s opus) because drawing well is simply harder than writing well. Or perhaps it’s because we still equate comics with Superman and Batman. But a blogger at the Dublin, Ireland, Web design company iQ Content noted this week that the usual association between comics and low-brow superhero stories is a Western thing. “In some cultures, notably Japan, comics (or Manga) are not only an accepted form of entertainment for people of all ages, they are used as product instruction manuals and even on government tax forms,” iQ Content senior analyst John Wood wrote. That sounds pretty smart to me. There are some cases where you just have to RTFM, as they say—and I think we’d all be happier if the M stood for Manga.

Not everyone is enchanted by the McCloud comic. It has already inspired a savage (but amusing) parody over at the website of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, which argues that the comic simply panders to Google’s geeky constituents, and that some software concepts are so arcane that they don’t lend themselves well to illustrations. And there have been a few complaints that at 38 pages, McCloud’s comic is too long. But I’m with Wood, who writes, “Personally, I’d rather wade through a 30+ page comic than 15 pages of technical detail, randomly salted with marketing bumpf.”

In short, the comic leaves a stronger, clearer impression than any writeup could have. Now we get to see whether Chrome is really as shiny as it seems in McCloud’s drawings.

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