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Provides: Simple comic book formatting

Format: CD

Developer: Plasq

Publisher: Freeverse

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3 (photo filtering requires Mac OS X v10.4)

Retail Price: $29.95

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 1.2.4

I fear programs such as Comic Life Deluxe, because I fear people who think that talking cats are funny. Talking cats are never funny, no matter how good their writers are. After all, the types of people who want to give their best jokes to cats really shouldn't be giving their jokes to anyone. Don't believe me? You go read Garfield. The cat's funnier when he doesn't actually say anything.

But I can't fault Comic Life Deluxe for the wealth of creepy cat comics it'll help produce any sooner than I can fault the pen for Garfield. Comic Life is just a tool, after all, but what a fantastic tool it is. Before I get into its mechanics, though, let's take a quick look at its history.

Comic Life began when Cris Pearson and a few other developers he was working with realized they should integrate their projects as they all had similar ideals in software and loved working together. The binding factor at plasq, then, is that they all appreciate easy, well designed apps, and they love what they're doing. They also all happen to be musicians, a talent which will manifest itself in future projects, I'm told. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the company, though, is that the developers are scattered all over the planet. Two live in Australia, one in France, one in Switzerland and one in the United States. The five work together via online chats, e-mail and Wiki.

Comic Life was soon born and was distributed directly by plasq (you can still get both the deluxe and a slightly chepaer standard version directly from their website), but Freeverse knows great software when they use it, so they picked up the program, repackaged it as Comic Life Deluxe, and are making the boxed version available at retail outlets. The difference? Freeverse's deluxe version adds a full-color printed manual, as well as more fonts, styles and templates for only $5 more than the standard version. People who received the standard version bundled with their new Intel Mac can upgrade to the deluxe version at plasq's website for $9.95.

It occurs to me I've talked a lot about this program but haven't actually mentioned what it does. Basically, Comic Life Deluxe is a page layout program, but with a strictly comic book flair. It's whole point is to allow you to create comics from your digital or scanned photos, artwork, etc. Its methods for doing this are so intuitive and simple that you'll find yourself wishing the gentlemen at plasq programmed every other application you use.

When you first launch Comic Life Deluxe, you're presented with a blank sheet onto which you can drag your page template from those provided (organized by styles such as "Built-in 00s Comic," "Strips" and "Manga." You can also create and save your own template by dragging over and resizing individual panels.

At the bottom right of the interface is a thumbnail gallery of your iPhoto pictures, organized using the familiar iPhoto libraries. As with the templates, getting photos onto the page is a simple matter of drag and drop. Place the photo in the panel, and it immediately falls behind it. The great thing about this is that although the picture is automatically scaled to fit, it can be expanded behind the panel so that although you only see the portion through the panel window, the full image is still behind it. In the screen capture of my comic below, the top panel is the full image. All of the other panels use the exact same image, and the whole image is there, but you only see the portion of the image I want you to. This allows you to create multiple panels using only one image, which saves plenty of time.

The picture I used in the comic above isn't from my iPhoto library, but is a graphic I created in Photoshop. Because Comic Life Deluxe doesn't allow you to place two photos in the same panel, you can't create background or layered effects using multiple images and transparencies. I wanted to create a bulletin board effect, so I took care of it outside Comic Life and imported it using the Finder button beneath the iPhoto library. Also note that you can capture photos directly into Comic Life using your iSight or digital camera. There are no guidelines regarding dpi or pixel width and height (I would like to plasq add an info box that indicates the dimensions of the panels), but I saved my image at 150 dpi and found it had been converted to 72 dpi when posted on .mac. More on that process in a bit.

Regardless of you how you brought in your photos, you're now ready to tell your story. This is what I really loved about the program; the ease of adding and placing the dialogue and narrative bubbles. As with the panels and photos, you simply drag your selected style of bubble to where you want it. Your type automatically resizes the bubble to fit, but you can do some resizing of your own after the fact. This is done by clicking on the green circles that surround your selected element (these same controls are used to resize your photos). When the bubble is sized and placed properly, you can click on the brown circle to place its origin point (the point from which the bubble is to emanate, usually the mouth of the character speaking). It's separate of the bubble itself, but remains attached. It couldn't be easier. The bubbles sit above the panels, so they can reach outside the boxes.

Once everything's in place, you then have the option to customize just about every aspect of the page. You can adjust the background color and gradient, apply filters and effects to your images (some of these are pretty cool, and you can tweak them, but you may at first find it difficult to achieve the effect you're after) and even control how the panels sit on top of the page (drop shadows, glows and such). This is where Freeverse's deluxe package trumps the standard version direct from plasq, as it adds over 100 styles and nearly 250 templates to the program.

Each project you create can have multiple pages, just like creating a Quark document with multiple pages. Thumbnails for each page are added to a panel on the left side of the interface, allowing you to view each page by simply clicking on it. When you save your project, each element is stored as an editable piece, so you can take the file to another machine and work on it there. For actually sharing and displaying your comic, you have a few different choices.

The best way to go is to publish it to your .mac account, if you have one. You can see mine here. This page is 100% the creation of Comic Life Deluxe and .mac. I touched nothing. If my comic had more than one page, the Next and Previous buttons you see after clicking the thumbnail would be lit accordingly. Going this route is as simple as telling Comic Life Deluxe to publish to .mac, although I did get an error message the first time I tried telling me I don't have an account. I went to my account and logged in manually to make sure everything was okay, then tried Comic Life again with success.

If you don't have a .mac account, you're not out of luck. You can export your comic to an HTML file which you can then either upload to your server straight off or edit first. If you already have your HTML template in place and just want to place the image (or just send the image directly to friends), you can export your comic in .jpg, .gif, .tif and .png formats. Here, you're allowed to select the dpi in case you want to go to print. Considering this, I recommend scanning at a good print resolution if you're importing your photos. You can also export your comic right back into iPhoto for safe keeping and quick access.

Now, if you're really feeling elaborate, you can create a QuickTime movie of your comic that will allow you to present it on the screen. You can take it directly into iMovie to add sound effects and such, but you're still looking at a whole page. As far as I could tell, you can't do this panel by panel, which would be really cool.

Comic Life Deluxe can be practical, too. For instance, you can bypass all of the comic ornaments and use it to simply create an online scrapbook of photos, easily organized as you see fit. Even better, for the directors out there who don't have the ability to draw anything recognizable, it can turn storyboarding into a simple matter of drag and drop, provided you've got a camera and a few actors/models (or action figures) to help out.

Plasq has done something great, here, in that they've created a program that's fun and simple to use, but that also manages to be useful. People will probably buy this program just to have fun with it, and they should, but it can easily expand into something more productive. And as long as those products don't involve talking cats, it's all good by me.