Comic Life 3 review: New tools help make you a better storyteller
For over eight years, Plasq’s Comic Life has provided an easy way to present your photos and other images in comic book form. (We previously reviewed version 1 and version 2 for Mac Gems.) Now at version 3, Comic Life offers more features geared toward people who have a serious interest in storytelling using the comic book medium.
Comic Life 3 now supports two-up page viewing.
It’s likely that most folks use Comic Life to throw a few pictures together to create simple, humorous anecdotes, and the app works well for that. But if you want to tell more detailed, complicated stories, Comic Life now has a Script Editor to help you form your comic’s storyline. The Script Editor uses keywords to automatically format the text in the proper way. For example, If you type a person’s name, Comic Life recognizes that you want to format the text as speech and will put it in a speech bubble. When the Script Editor recognizes a keyword (Comic Life has a set of default keywords, but you can also add your own), it creates an icon specific to that keyword that appears in an icon column on the left side of your script. You can then drag and drop the icons into your comic and easily adjust the formatting to your liking.
Of course, not everyone will want to use the Script Editor—what makes Comic Life so great is that it makes the process of creating your comic fun, and the Script Editor can make it feel more like work. But in 2012, the overall North American market for newsstand comics and trade paperback sales reached over $700 million, so it is work for a lot of people, and the Script Editor makes Comic Life a better real-world tool for those people.
The new Script Editor lets you work on your comic’s script before putting all the elements on a page.
One quirk with the Script Editor is that there seems to be no dynamic relationship between the script and the layout, so if you decide to add any kind of text to your comic while in the layout view, those words aren’t automatically added to your script. For example, I decided to add a sound effect to one panel while in layout view; to keep the script consistent with the comic, I had to go into the script and add the sound effect manually.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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