Comic Life: Make cartoons and comics
Comic Life was one of the first apps I used in the classroom and which I actually paid for! It now comes as a free version for your computer, which has got everything you need, or a cheap mobile app.
It’s a fun application that lets you create a real life comic with your photos images and is super easy to work with. In fact, using it feels more like playing around – you can drag and drop your images onto the interface, arrange them onto a page, drag over speech bubbles and enter your text. The functions on Comic Life also make wonderful squelchy squeaky burping noises when you use them – which serve no useful purpose but definitely add to the fun.
Comic Life offers bunches of shapes, forms and lettering with styles reminiscent of the best cartoons and comics. All can be customised from the style attributes tab on the right. I also like the filters, which lets you give a real atmosphere to your photos, like turning them into a scene from Sin City. Comic Life also features loads of templates and themes that you can start off with.
Importing pictures into Comic Life is easy, as you’ll only need to drag and drop them from your desktop or pick straight from the preview pane in the application. You can also use your webcam or DV camera to take snaps and post them immediately into your comic strip.
Young people can export their completed comics as a jpeg file and add to their digital narrative. Of course some people may want to do their whole story as a strip cartoon – which is fine. Alternatively, use the cartoon as basis for the story and add hot spots with ThingLink.
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