Bob and Joy Schwabach
Posted on Monday, June 26, 2006
MAKE A COMIC BOOK. PRINT A COMIC BOOK.
BE A COMIC BOOK. This is no laughing matter. What we have here is a program for making comic books. It may sound silly and trivial, but not to us superheroes. Comic Book Creator is for the PC from Planetwide Games. The title is self-explanatory, and mastering it is easy. The program comes with comic book page layouts of empty frames. You fill those frames with scenes grabbed from video games, your own photos, movie stills, drawings, etc. This is all done with dragand-drop. About a hundred cartoon drawings are supplied to start you off, and hundreds more are available for free at the company’s Web site: www. mycomicbookcreator. com. You can also get a free trial of the program there. The standard version is $ 30. And there are two other versions: One is based on the new movie comedy “Nacho Libre.” Sony Entertainment Online offers a $ 35 version for players of the hit game Everquest. Unlike the standard version, the Nacho Libre and Everquest Comic Book Creators don’t let you add your own art. Other content will soon be available from National Geographic, Paramount Pictures and Nickolodeon.
In order to make any content useful in the creation of a comic book, the program itself comes with a built-in frame grabber. This is a utility that allows you to freeze and save anything you see on the computer screen. Once you have the pictures you want, you can move them into the ready-made comic book templates and add text balloons. The balloons are blank; you fill in the text.
At first this seems like an exercise for kids. Kids can do it — the program is easy to use — but it turns out that businesses and schools have already shown interest. A business can easily make a clever product promotion comic book, and at least one has already begun a training manual in comic book style. A schoolteacher has started using it to make comic books to teach science. The finished comic book, and individual pages, whether for fun, business or education, can be saved as a PDF, JPEG, BMP and other formats. This means it can be sent by e-mail, posted to a Web site or simply printed out. You will soon be able to post your own comic books to www.comicbooksociety.net. If you visit this site now you can see the first four comic books posted and flip through the pages just like viewing a paper comic book.
