Dudes, there’s only a couple of days until Christmas. And do you know what you forgot to do? Send out Christmas cards. Or maybe you just got a Christmas card from someone to whom you didn’t think to send anything. That’s bad news, right? What will you say when you see her at the New Year’s Eve party? “Oh, it must’ve been lost in the mail. I’m sure it’ll get there soon.”
No, you won’t say that, because you won’t have to. Instead, she’ll be complimenting you on your unique twist on holiday cards. More personal than a greeting card and shorter than a form letter (I think…I never actually read them), you sent a Christmas comic. How? With Freeverse’s Comic Life Deluxe Edition.
This $30 program supplies the proper formatting and easy integration for many different styles of comics. All you need to supply is the creativity and the photos.
After you purchase ($29.95) and download Comic Life, you’ll open the program to see the following screen:
The main area shows the layout of your comic. On the upper right, I’ve opened a window to show just some of the pre-defined layout options at your disposal. Select the one you want, and you’re set to go. Of course, you can also create your own layout from scratch or edit any of the preset layouts, but we’re on a schedule here. I’ll save that for another article.
Once you’ve made your selection, it’s time to bring in the images. You can import photos and illustrations from your hard drive or even take a photo with iSight, but if you already store all of your photos in iPhoto, you’ve got direct access.
Comic Life even recognizes your user-created albums, making it easy to find the photo you want. Once you’ve got it, just drag it into the proper panel. Done. Comic Life automatically sizes the photo as it feels appropriate, but you can of course resize it, position it, and more.
Once you’ve got your photo in place, it’s time add a speech bubble. Again, this is just a matter of dragging the bubble design of your choice onto the photo. It starts small, but don’t worry. Add your text, and it’ll automatically expand to fit. I’ve found it almost always needs adjustments, but you can do this by clicking on bubble’s bounding box and dragging it appropriately. The text will automatically reflow within, and then you can drag the box around to find the best placement. Position the speech bubble so it appears to be coming from the subject’s mouth, and you’re set.
Do this for all the panels, and you’re done. Comic Life makes it very easy to edit all the pieces throughout the entire project; simply click on an item to select it and make edits. If it’s behind another object, you send the top object to the back to allow access. You can even add extra pages if you need more room to tell your story. It’s all quite intuitive, and quite fun.
When you’re ready to share it, you have multiple options. Comic Life can publish your work directly to iWeb or .Mac (they still call it .Mac, God bless ‘em), or you can instantly format it for e-mail. You can also export to PDF (especially handy for multi-page comics), HTML, iPhoto and QuickTime. Of course, if you just want to save it as an image, that’s available, too. Comic Life will create a folder with your file name, and place all of the pages inside as their own image file.
When you’re done, you get this:
Appropriate? Perhaps not, but it certainly looks like it took more than 10 minutes to put together, right? E-mail that to friends and family on Christmas Eve, and it’ll look like this is what you meant to do all along.
Comic Life Deluxe contains many more features than what I’ve covered here, but this is all you’ll need for your Christmas card. If it sounds good, I’ll make it sound ever better; right now through December 31st, Freeverse is offering a special on Comic Life Deluxe; enter the code “Festivus” at checkout and you’ll get 25% off your order.
Give it a whirl. It’ll surely impress, and may have the hidden benefit of embarrassing your form letter friends from sending you one next year.
If that’s not a Christmas miracle, I don’t know what is.
Product [Comic Life Deluxe Edition]
Great Guide Kirk! I'll go through my list again and if I forgot anyone I'll make a comic, great idea… Why wasn't it posted earlier!
One question: Is Comic Life free? I know it comes pre-installed on all Macs, but is that just a demo version?
Not free. It's $30, but you get 25% off that right now using the code mentioned in the article. There's a demo version available, but I'm not sure what it restricts.