Comic Life – A Masterpiece of Mac Software

What do you get when you combine a group of smart developers, mixed with a great idea and a lot of hard work? Under the right conditions you get a truly unique piece of software that was deemed worthy of the prestigious Apple Design Awards, specifically named as the Best Product New to Mac OS X. The accomplishment is all the more notable when you consider that the runner-up is the also amazing Delicious Library. Such a product would look at lot like Comic Life from Plasq.

Comic Life is one of those absolutely fun to use applications that combines an extremely easy to use interface along with well implemented integration with the rest of your Mac, including iPhoto and the iSight camera. As soon as you’ve finished creating your first comic, you will be hooked.

The basic premise is simple. You can use pictures that you’ve already taken that are stored in iPhoto or come up with something unique to tell the story, or just grab your digital camera and shoot away. Once you’ve got your source images ready to go, simply fire up Comic Life and get ready for some fun. Step 1 is quite simple, choose from one of the many pre-built page templates to layout your strip. Directly below that is your entire iPhoto library, complete with a drop down to isolate specific photo groups. From here, you literally drag your images into the individual frames until you’ve built the basic comic strip.

Here is where it gets really interesting. Comic Life offers a whole slew of tools that allow you to embellish and customize your comic with various labels, thought and speech balloons and formatting options. Imagine the comic books of your youth with their bold headlines exclaiming POW! as Batman lands an upper right hook on the Joker followed by a loud “BAM!” in the next frame (go with me here, I just saw Batman Begins) and you will get a feel for what kind of great effects Comic Life allows you to embellish your strips with. Words alone don’t do it justice so be sure to take a look at their Gallery to see what this software can really do.

In addition to the regular version, Freeverse has recently published Comic Life Deluxe Edition which include new fonts, a huge number of new Templates and over 200 styles but by far the stand out new feature is the ability to turn your photographs into cartoons which just has to be seen to be believed. Doing this trick in Photoshop used to be a real chore but Comic Life Deluxe makes that a thing of the past.

All in all, a really fun application. It’s flexible output features which includes TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, HTML, iPhoto and Quicktime make it useful in a variety of ways. If you’ve got kids, this application would make a great stocking stuffer. Keep an eye on Plasq, they’ve got the makings of a fantastic Mac developer and I personally can’t wait to see what they come up with next. If you are curious to see behind the curtain of Comic Life, check out this recent podcast with the developer.