10 Ways to Create Comics Online

10 Ways to Create Comics OnlineCreating cartoons and comic strips can be a good way to get reluctant writers writing.While creating comics you and your students can work through the elements of fictionin a context that is fun and familiar to them.Witty Comics provides a simple platform that students can use to createtwo character dialogues. To use Witty Comics students just need to select the pre-drawnbackground scenes and the pre-drawn characters they want to feature in their comics.Writing the dialogues is the creative element that is left to the students.Artisan Cam is more than just a comic creator, it is a comprehensive collection of onlineart activities. On Artisan Cam students can use the Super Action Comic Maker to build asix frame comic. The Super Action Comic Maker has a drag and drop interface whichstudents use to select a background and character for their comics.The Super Hero Squad invites kids to create their own super hero comic strips andcomic books. The Super Hero Squad provides users with templates for comic strips andcomic books. Users select the backgrounds, characters, and special effects from theprovided menus. Arranging each scene and re-size the characters is an easy drag anddrop process. After creating their scenes, users can add dialogue boxes to their comics.Completed comic strips and comic books can be downloaded and printed.Pixton is a drag-and-drop cartoon creation tool which allows anyone regardless ofartistic ability to create comics. Users can join the Pixton community to share theircreations with other. In addition to the free individual accounts Pixton offers Pixton forSchools (not free) which allows teachers to create private rooms in which only theirstudents can create and share comics. To learn more about Pixton, watch this shortvideo.

Strip Generator allows anyone, even people who claim they can't draw, to create a goodlookingblack and white comic strip. To create a comic strip all you need to do is selectthe number of frames you want then drag characters and objects into those frames. Themenus for characters and objects are fairly extensive. Once you've selected a characteror object you can adjust the size to fit your scene. Adding text is a simple matter ofselecting a speech bubble and typing text. When you're happy with your comic strip youcan save it online, print it, or embed it into your blog.PikiKids provides a variety of layouts to whichstudents can upload images then edit the images or add text bubbles and titles. Thecomics that students create can be embedded into a blog or website as well as be sharedvia email. PikiKids is free to use, but it is a for profit website as it offers options forbuying tee-shirts or mugs with user-created comics.Write Comics is a free, simple tool for creating comic strips. Write Comics doesn'trequire any registration to use. In fact, registration is not even an option. To create acomic on Write Comics just select a background from the menu, choose somecharacters, and add some speech bubbles. You can continue adding frames until you'vecompleted your story. Write Comics is quite easy to use, but there is one short-comingand that is the only way you can save your work is to save it to your local hard drive.Make Beliefs is a free comic strip creation tool that providesstudents with a variety of templates, characters, and prompts for building their owncomic strips. Make Beliefs provides students with a pre-drawn characters and dialogueboxes which they can insert into each box of their comic strip. The editing options allowusers the flexibility to alter the size of each character and dialogue bubble, bringelements forward within each box, and alter the sequence of each box in the comic strip.Students that have trouble starting a story can access writing prompts through makebeliefs. Most impressively, Make Beliefs allows users to write their comic strip's dialoguein English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portugese, or Latin.

Be Funky is a simple tool for turning digital photographs into digital comics. The imageyou see to the left is a cartoonized image of me based on a photograph I took with mywebcam. Be Funky can be used for simple one frame images or be used to create anentire strip of cartoonized images with inserted text.Chogger is a free comic strip creation tool offering a goodselection of editing tools. Chogger allows you to draw images from scratch or use yourexisting images. You can even connect your webcam to Chogger to capture pictures foruse in your comic strips. Once you've added images to your comic strip, you can addeffects such as fading and outlining. Chogger also allows you to customize the look ofeach frame in your comic strip. Comic strips created in Chogger can have as few as threeframes or as many as twelve or more frames.Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:20 Ways to Use Comics in Your ClassroomMore than 100 Editorial Cartoon Lesson PlansPictures and Cartoons from PRI's The World