Comic Life
plasq
Price: $24.95 (free 30 day trial)
Pros: Fun and intuitive interface, outstanding integration with .Mac and iPhoto, great results are easy.
Cons: No audio support, no live updating of placed images, no transition effects in QuickTime output.
by Gerrit Dalman
One of the things that makes Mac users so passionate about the platform is that - unlike other operating systems - it's easy and even fun to use. That ease of use and light-hearted nature often flows over to third party software. A great example is plasq's Comic Life.
Comic Life lets you make your own comics with ease. Using whatever images you have on your computer you can fill the cells of preformatted or custom pages. The results can be shared online, printed for distribution, or just passed around as humorous cards and emails.
You can start with just about any image format you like; including Photoshop - though it won't update frames as you change the original source file. Don't worry if you're not an artist either. All you need is an iPhoto collection. Comic Life's outstanding integration with Apple technologies makes it possible to place images from your iPhoto library into cells directly in the project window. If you want to make it look more like a real comic and less like a photo montage you can also apply a number of built-in filters using Apple's CoreImage technology to change the look of the pictures.
Once you've got your cells filled in you tell your story by dragging and dropping caption boxes as well as speech and thought bubbles onto the page. Formatting bubbles is one of the hardest parts of laying out a comic, but since it's the whole purpose of the program, Comic Life makes it incredibly easy.
Add "sound effect text" is easy too. All those exaggerated letters that dramatically project "POW," "BOOM," and "WOOSH" across the page to simulate sounds are even easier than the text bubbles. Any words can be colored, stretched, skewed, and distorted with ease to project the proper tone.
And once you've finished your creation, Comic Life helps you share it with others too. You can export pages as individual images, HTML pages, or even QuickTime movies (sorry, no page transitions). As if that wasn't enough, it's got two more export features that are above and beyond!
The first is .Mac export, which automatically posts functional web versions of your comics on your homepage. If you post more than one you can even use the integrated "manage .Mac comics" tool to reorganize and rename them.
The second is iPhoto export, which creates a new album containing the pages of your comic. This makes it very easy to archive, organize, and print your creative expressions. But even better, it's an easy way to publish high quality versions as iPhoto books.
Comic Life expands your options for sharing memories and expressing creative ideas and does so with great ease and style. I've never been amused by an application before. I often expect the content to be fun, but little details like descriptive sound effects for most actions made me from the first time I used it.
If you've got a creative streak that could be channeled into a comic strip or book or if you often have pictures of humorous situations that deserve illustrative words rather than just a plain text caption, you should really give Comic Life a try!
System Requirements:
* Mac OS X 10.3 or higher (10.4 required for CoreImage filters)