Comic Life 3: How to Create Fun and Original Comics on macOS
English translation of an italian post that was originally published on Levysoft.it
Comic Life 3 is an application for macOS that allows you to transform your photos and images into fun and original comics. This application is really easy to use and offers an intuitive and entertaining interface with dozens of layout templates, with the ability to customize colors, fonts, filters, speech bubble comics, and captions.
A little bit of history
For those of us who have been using Apple products for many years, like me, you might remember that Apple itself distributed Comic Life for a while, preinstalled on Macs. In fact, it was one of the default apps you would find on all Macs purchased between 2005 and 2011. It was back in 2005 when, after the incredible announcement that Apple was switching to Intel CPUs, a certain Scott Forstall showcased Comic Life on the WWDC stage. Of course, that app also won the award for “Best New Product on Mac OS X” at the Apple Design Awards. Comic Life was perfect for taking advantage of the capabilities of the integrated camera on Macs, the iSight, and for creating custom comics with photos taken with Photo Booth. It also integrated perfectly with iPhoto, iTunes, and iWeb, the other default Mac apps. Less than a year later, at Macworld Expo, it was announced that all new Intel iMac and MacBook Pro would be sold bundled with Comic Life. From that moment on, designers and artists from around the world began to use it.
This should help you understand the quality of this application, which has continually updated over the years, becoming more comprehensive and keeping up with the times. It offers new features and creative possibilities to Mac users, taking the fun and creativity of comics to a higher level.
Description
If you are a fan of comics or simply want to create unique memories with your photos, Comic Life 3 is the application for you. It allows you to create projects for every occasion (school, family, events, hobbies, and more), helping you express your creativity and personality in an original way.
As soon as you open the application, you can immediately choose from dozens of layout templates across categories such as Certificates, Creative, Education, How-To, Life Stories, Single Panels, and Classic:
Once you have selected the desired layout type, you will move on to the actual editor. It is characterized by a menu bar at the top, a pages section on the left (which you can add, copy, and move around) and styles, the main project in the center, the layout and access to the photo library on the right, and finally, different types of speech bubbles at the bottom:
The layouts that you can choose for the page are divided by type or year: Basic, Maps, 40’s Comic, 60’s Comic, 80’s Comic, 00’s Comic, Picture-In-Picture, Euro Comic, Manga, Futuristic, Conceptual, Strip, and Graphic Novel.
Once you have chosen the page layout, you can apply the style to the individual panel, and with a simple drag and drop, you can move the various captions, lettering titles, and speech bubbles. You can also move the speech bubble line to the desired position that extends towards the character that is speaking.
Comic Life 3 also offers image editing tools, such as the Instant Alpha tool that allows you to remove the background of an image, which works very well with monochromatic backgrounds.
The default saving option for Comic Life 3 is the Comic Archive document (with a .comiclife extension). This format will allow you to save, reopen, and continue working on your project whenever you want. Of course, for those who want to publish their comic, it is possible to export it directly in ePub and CBZ formats. For simpler sharing with friends or family, there is also the possibility to export it directly as image or high-resolution PDF file.
Integrated Scriptwriting
Comic Life 3 is not just an application for fun, but also a storytelling tool. In fact, another very interesting aspect that I have never found in other comic creation apps is the ability to have the script integrated into the comic project. This means that you can write the text of your stories directly in the application, without having to use other programs or sheets of paper. The advantage of this system is that it allows you to better organize your ideas, monitor the narrative flow and plot consistency, and have an overview of your comic.
If you have a story to tell, you can use the Script Editor to write or import your script before putting all the elements on the page.
Furthermore, an aspect not to be underestimated is the ability to easily edit the text of the script and see how the final result changes on the comic pages. In fact, the Script Editor uses keywords to automatically format the text in the appropriate way, indicating to the application whether the text is a caption, lettering, or dialogue.
The keywords are: TITLE, CAPTION, SFX, Page #, Panel #. The text of the dialogues, on the other hand, is simply identified by a word (which is not a keyword) followed by a colon. In this way, you can indicate any character’s name and it will understand that it is a dialogue. So, if you write the name of a person, Comic Life 3 will understand that you want to format the text as a speech and will put it in a bubble. Then, you can drag and drop the bubble icon onto your page and change the format to your liking.
It is also interesting to have the possibility to add a qualifier in parentheses to identify the type of balloon that should be created.
For example, you can use:
(whisper): Whisper
(thought): Thought
To insert page breaks, simply use the PAGE tag. This will automatically result in a physical page break during printing, allowing the pages of the script to align with the layout pages.
With the PANEL tag, you can identify and describe the panel (the single visual unit within a comic page and usually a rectangular frame that contains an image, a caption, and dialogue). Dragging the panel icon onto the page simply creates a free panel outside the layout scheme and will need to be adapted and resized according to your needs.
It is with the PANEL tag that you can describe what you want to show within the panel. A very useful function if you are giving directions to an artist.
Of course, these keywords are just starting points, and you can change them in the Script/Keywords section of the Inspector (Control) window with any combination of words you prefer. You can even localize them into Italian or use abbreviations.
Comic Life 3, in one of the two script templates, also offers great suggestions for writing an effective script, based on the principles of screenwriting.
Styles
I would like to draw particular attention to a small, but important, element like the Styles of Comic Life. They are well integrated and, depending on which element is selected, they will change.
In particular, we have the styles of:
- Page
- Panel
- Lettering
- Speech Bubble
- Image
Moreover, each style has the possibility to increase the level of the filter used with a simple slider:
or to go into more detail with a greater number of adjustments, using the Inspector (Control):
And it is on the style of the image that I would like to dwell, because these filters allow you to transform a simple photographic image into a drawing. For example, with a simple black and white pencil effect filter, you can turn a photo into a drawing:
In this way, even those who are not artistically gifted can create the comic of their dreams!
Who is the target audience?
Comic Life 3 for macOS is an application that I recommend to anyone who wants to tell their stories through comics because it’s fun (just think of the sound effects it makes every time you move or resize an element), easy to use, and offers many creative possibilities. However, it’s not suitable for those who want to draw and publish traditional comics or manga with their own characters and backgrounds. There are other professional drawing applications for that purpose, which can complement Comic Life for the design and final stages of your comic.
For those who may not be professionals but still have artistic aspirations and want the satisfaction of creating their own comics, they can use the iPad version of Comic Life, called Comic Draw. It allows you to use the same basic drawing tools in an environment similar to what you see on macOS, even with the Apple Pencil.
Finally, for those who only have a great story they want to turn into a graphic novel but don’t feel up to the artistic work, they could consider taking photos and perhaps transforming them into drawings with filters as seen above.
Inventing Stories Like Stan Lee
Comics are considered a visual and narrative art form that stands out for its ability to combine drawing, writing, and storytelling in a unique and engaging format. And when we talk about comics, we can’t help but think of the master of this art: Stan Lee. But what perhaps not everyone knows is that Stan Lee was just a writer: he invented the characters, gave them their traits, powers, and settings. Then he handed everything over to the artists who drew the characters according to his instructions and then created the pages. Finally, Stan Lee would write the dialogues, adapting them to the scenes imagined in detail by the artists.
Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to have a team of artists, colorists, and illustrators on hand to follow our instructions. But taking inspiration from this anecdote and from Stan Lee’s creative process, we can use the new technologies of generative art to our advantage, such as Dall-E 3, Bing, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or use the excellent AI Comic Factory that allows you to create a comic page in the artistic style you desire in a few steps.
By using these tools, we could roughly outline our own script, which could be further refined with the help of ChatGPT. Then, with the help of generative art software, we could try prompts to create images as we imagine them. Once we find our style and desired images, we could import them into Comic Life and then, based on your script, write captions and dialogues.
As an example, here is a page from a graphic novel that I was able to create simply with an idea in mind and the artistic assistance of a generative image AI, assembling everything with Comic Life:
While using the filters in Comic Life, I turned it into a classic black and white comic:
Where to find it
Comic Life 3 is an app for macOS 10.10.3 or later, which allows you to turn your photos and images into fun and original comics and offers an intuitive and entertaining interface. The interface is fully localized in Italian.
It is available directly on the App Store for €34.99 or directly from the Plasq’s website for €30.49 (or if you come from Comic Life, Comic Life Deluxe, Comic Life 2 or
Comic Life Magiq, for $14.99). From the official website, you can download a free 30-day trial version to evaluate the purchase. For those interested in the iPad version that I mentioned earlier, there is also Comic Draw available for free and the full version can be unlocked with an in-app purchase for €9.99. Finally, there is also a version for Windows and Chromebook.
