The templates are prepopulated with story cells, space for headlines and background colors. The app then offers a selection of comic strip templates with different themes, like wild west, futuristic or moody black and white. Because the app relies on your photos to create stories, you don’t need any drawing skills to get a good result.Īfter opening the app, you tap on the + button to create a comic. The app’s main trick is taking images that you’ve snapped with your device’s camera, applying effects to them and adding art on top to create a traditional-looking comic strip. Of the comic book apps I’ve used, Comic Life, $5 for an iOS version, has the most features and works best on an iPad because of the bigger screen. Now, if you want to put a comic strip together and provide your own drama and emotion, there are many mobile apps that can do the basic artwork for you. Quite frankly, it does nothing better than the other two apps, and does plenty worse.THE way a comic book artist can convey so much emotion, drama and narrative with just a few simple lines has always amazed me. It’s finicky, it constantly hides the editing bar, it tagged my ex-girlfriend, and it doesn’t even save. Strip Designer doesn’t quite match Comic Life’s mix of power and cuteness, but it’s still a fine, fun app.ĬomicBook, however, can’t hang with these other two apps. In fact, if the app ditched the comic effects completely (which I’m not suggesting it should), it would make an excellent iPhoto album creator for iPad. But if it did, the end result would likely look an awful lot like Comic Life.

Stripped Down: Strip Designer’s themes are pretty minimalistic, but the app can still create great-looking comics.Īpple’s probably never going to make an app of this sort. Both Comic Life and Strip Designer allow you to save projects and reopen them later. Yes, you can export your creations for later viewing, but you can never go back and edit them again once you move on to your next one. You can have one sheet open at a time make a new one, and your old one is gone forever. Moving, zooming, rotating, and cropping photos in Comic Life feels slightly less fluid than in the other two apps, but not so much that it causes frustration.Įven worse, ComicBook was the only one of the three apps that doesn’t save your books for later editing. Vivid Apps’s Strip Designer outshines both ComicBook and ComicLife: It includes options for pulling in photographs from your Facebook account, adding freestyle drawings, and inserting custom maps.Īll of the apps allow for simple, inspired manipulation of the photos (and other elements) you add to your comic books-using gestures that will feel familiar to anyone who’s used the iWork suite for iOS. (ComicLife isn’t iPhone compatible.) ComicBook, for some odd reason, sports laughably tiny tap targets the buttons to press to insert or take a photograph are far smaller than necessary, and thus annoying to tap. ComicBook and Strip Designer also work on the iPhone, so you can take pictures with that device’s built-in camera too. All three apps offer multiple (tweakable) layouts for each page of your book, but only Comic Life embraces colorful, charming themes: Strip Designer’s themes are grayscale and plain, and ComicBook is entirely themeless.Įach of the apps allows you to insert photos from your photo library, or-if you’re using an iPad 2-take pictures with your built-in camera. The themes feel reminiscent of the options Apple offers when you create custom photo albums in iPhoto.

Plasq offers unique, colorful, and truly thematic themes-flowers, summertime, travel, and the like. Summer Better Than Others: Comic Life’s built-in themes, like the flowery summer background seen here, go unmatched by the other two apps reviewed.

Comic life on ipad