The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Comic Book Creator 2 Keith Nallawalla |
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Have you ever wished you
could draw comics?
Now it's easy, in the
form of Comic Book Creator 2 by Planetwide Media.
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This is a design package that
has all the features you'd expect
for making a comic book, such
as pre-set page layout templates,
speech bubbles, caption boxes,
separate pages and cover art. Not surprisingly for this web-savvy generation, it
comes with nontraditional features such as sound and video for online comics. The program is compatible with JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG and TIF image files as well as AVI, MPG, MPEG, and WMV video files and MP3, WAV and WMA audio files. Getting Started When installing the program, make sure that you install the Art Assets packs or else you won't have much to work with. These extras give you many more speech bubbles, caption boxes and clip art. The clip art isn't necessarily useful as many pictures may not work well with your drawing style, but the huge range of text boxes should cover most of your needs. I initially found the program little tricky to work out. Fortunately, there are online tutorials, but they seem to be from the previous version of Comic Book Creator, as the interface looks a little different - but the principles are still the same. I found the tutorials a little slow to load, but once I got the hang of it, the program was easy to use. I also found that my projects took a while to load (but my computer is four years old and in need of an upgrade). |
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In The Frame
When I was in high school a couple of years ago, I used Adobe Photoshop or Adobe
Illustrator to make comics. Comic Book Creator comes with some cool templates to
frame your page, which saves time compared to the Adobe programs. Each frame
panel hides the edges of the picture, so you don't have to worry about cropping
your images or making a clipping mask the way you would in other programs. The
images are made
to fit within the predetermined box sizes that you have chosen in your layout.
You can choose the size of your page so you can print your book on various sizes
of paper.
This program seems to work best in conjunction with other image-editing programs
such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. You wouldn't want to try making a comic
using only what's
available within this program.
It's possible to have animations and videos in your comic book for publishing
and viewing online. You can share comics you've
created with the rest of the comic creator community on their social network
www.hypercomics.com or on YouTube or Facebook.
I'm having fun using this program.
The basic program includes:
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PC Update ratings: Ease of use: 6 Features: 8 Documentation: 5 Value for money: 9 We liked: Feature set Disliked: Learning curve Vendor: Planetwide Games www.planetwidegames.com buy direct or amazon.com Price US$49.99 |
Reprinted from the August 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
