Tools to create comics

There are many ways to use your computer skills in a creative way: making a special CD with your favorite songs, creating a calendar with your photos or designing personal greeting cards are just some basic examples. But if you feel the urge to unleash your inner artist, you can take a step forward and start by creating your own comics. There are plenty of software tools to assist you – even if you’re hopeless at drawing.

Comic Life
Probably the most popular comic app out there. It enables you to create comics from scratch or start off with any of its featured templates. Each element can be extensively customized, including image filters and text fonts. You can even use you webcam to take a snapshot and add it to your comic right away.

Comic Book Creator
Though not as well-known as Comic Life, this program lets you create professional-looking comics by using any of its 500 layout and design templates. Comics can then be printed or published to your website, blog or social profile.

Manga Studio
As its name states, Manga Studio is specially designed to create manga, the Japanese style comics. The program includes all the drawing tools you need, plus a bunch of ready-to-use templates, characters, balloons, background elements and more.

Comiqs
This online comic app allows you to use photos uploaded from your PC or from a photo-sharing website like Flickr. Tools include many varied speech bubbles, frames and fonts. The interface can be tested without registering and supports drag and drop so you’ll be creating comics in no time and embedding them on other sites.

StripGenerator
In StripGenerator, another online tool, you can create occasional strips without registering. But if you want to use special features such as user comments, ratings and even a strip blog, you need to register – no big deal, it’s free. Strips are created with black and white pre-designed characters.

ToonDoo
This last online tool also enables you to create comic strips, though in a quite different style. Your work is bases on predefined elements as well – characters, objects, backgrounds and the likes – but they follow a more colorful, cartoonish style. You need to register in order to use the editor.