I just read Scott McCloud's comic explaining Google Chrome, and I found myself reacting much the way I do when Steve Jobs reveals something new and amazing, like the iPhone, in one of his famous keynote presentations.

I was excited by the content, which had some of the best attributes of a "Stevenote" announcement:

• We decided to rethink an old problem from scratch.
• Here are some of our developers to talk about it.
• How do people use this thing?
• What are the biggest problems with the way it's been done traditionally?
• Innovative solutions.
• Sometimes less is more.
• It's available now (okay, in beta, and only on Windows, but Google betas aren't really betas, and they're working on the Mac version).

I was equally excited by the medium — the comic format used to present all this information. Back in the 90's, McCloud's Understanding Comics revealed aspects of comics as a storytelling art form that added a whole new dimension to the graphic novels I was reading. I remember being fascinated by the concept of the "gutter" — the space between frames of the comic — because in that space are the implied transitions between frames that your brain fills in.

Years later, I saw that McCloud was still doing interesting stuff. I particularly liked his autobiographical comic, My Obsession with Chess.

How fitting and clever it is for McCloud to use his particular talent for communication to explain Google Chrome. I am sure every page was as meticulously thought out as a Steve Jobs slide show. I wonder if other companies will try to use comics in the same way, and I wonder if this will create a whole new category of job opportunities for talented comic artists.

UPDATE: the comic URL I gave above doesn't let you jump to a specific page, or get a URL for a specific page that you can send to someone. I just noticed you can do those things here, but the graphics are not as sharp.