I had a call for a freelance gig from the BSC of North Carolina. They said they wanted to present their previous year’s work in comics/cartoons to be displayed on a flastscreen TV at their next conference. They had 14 comics they wanted turned around rather quickly and they were providing text and images. I had no idea how much text I was getting or the quality of the images but I knew we would make it work.
I had never heard of Comic Life prior to this job and was skeptical when I was told about it. I downloaded a copy and dove right in AND was I surprised! This software is awesome! It was very intuitive and I was throwing together comics in no time. I love this little program!
With each new comic I would try a little something different. For instance, I wondered if Comic Life would allow me to try PhotoShop alpha channels that would overlap with existing panels, art, and color blends…and…bingo, no worries! Whatever I dreamed of I could do. I even experimented with importing and exporting differing dpi and file formats* — no problem.
Thanks BSC of NC for coming up with a fun project and thank you Plasq for creating such a fun, affordable, and powerful piece of software. I would never have been able to complete this job if it weren’t for you. Here’s a couple screen shots from this project. Keep up the good work Plasq!
Available Now v1.3
The product version I used was Comic Life v1.2.6. Although, now you can purchase (or for registered owners, download for free) version 1.3 from Plasq. New features include: multiple images per panel, multi-tailed speech balloons (this was clunky in the earlier version), new icons (yea! no more having to create them from scratch), a viral “Email this Comic” button, and more. Version 1.3 is compatible with Macintosh G3, G4, and G5 running OSX 10.3.9 or higher. Also, it’s now a Universal version supporting Intel-based Macs.
*I ended up delivering fourteen 150dpi .png files that looked fabulous on the monitors they were going to use at the conference. I tried jpeg’s but the compression softened the images too much.
WeirdGuy Creative 