Microsoft Launches IT Superhero Comic

willdavid writes "Paul McDougall reports in InformationWeek on Microsoft's new online comic. The Heroes Happen Here comic strips are being created by Jordan Gorfinkel, a former DC Comics editor who helped revitalize the Batman series. 'Tech workers who in the middle of the night fix a downed server or take on a computer virus don't really have extraordinary powers. It just seems that way. But a new comic book has debuted in which IT pros literally are superheroes. The daily Web comic, called Heroes Happen Here, features tech savvy crime fighters like Lord Firewall, who "stands between chaos and order" and says things like "begone vermin!"'" And because it's never easy, in order to read the archives of the comic you're going to need to install Microsoft's Silverlight.

Comments

Heroic plot idea

[Sloppy]

In a Web 2.0 twist, readers will be asked to submit real-life IT stories that could possibly be used for future episodes.

The hero deploys a mail client that doesn't execute a fucking attachment when someone clicks it. Then the hero deploys a web browser that doesn't execute someone else's code when a user looks at a web page. Then the hero deploys an OS that doesn't load and execute code from removable media whenever the user inserts the media, and doesn't automatically treat somebody else's code as automatically executable simply because the user happened to save it and then clicked it in their file manager.

The climax of the story: the users never have any problems and never bother to call him to remove viruses, because they never get any. The users are bored and nobody knows why. Nobody knows the sacrifice the hero made, because it wasn't really a sacrifice and it ended up costing less. The hero, tragically depressed because he missed out on all the !!!GLORY!!! of cleaning up easily predictable and preventable messes, walks off into the sunset.

Sound like a good episode?

is that an example on the link?

[NotZed]

It isn't even funny. It isn't even remotely funny, nor particularly entertaining, and barely makes sense for that matter.

And the stereotyping is just sad - but what do you expect from 'an outsider'. Not all technical people are 1. overweight, 2. wear druggie shirts, nor 3. give a shit about hackers. And it's also pushing that other sickening stereotype that seems to pervade American comedy - that guys are bumbling/overweight 'lovable fools' and girls are smart and classy/usually at least a bit hot.

A very strange form of viral marketing for their craptastic clone of the craptastic flash software though. I imagine it could only be dreamt up in the strange cultures that develop in the closed world that Microsoft and other large companies seem to develop. (Novell was almost cult-like, and a little scary to be honest). I bet they thought it would be really 'cool', 'nifty', and 'hip', and no doubt plenty of their cult-members think the same.