Well, who doesn’t? Those were the golden days of comic strip books. Comic strips have existed since 1900 and still are a vintage way to narrate a story. However, graphic design is a great skill, and people often limit their creativity, thinking they lack the design aspect. That’s why we’ve handpicked the best comic strip tools that’ll let you showcase your comic strip creation talent and make everyone nostalgic.
What are Comic Strips?
Comic strips are artistic sections of cartoons and images that depict a story. They’re a seasoned way to showcase your imagination from the early times. We’re sure you came across these comic strips in newspapers and magazines. As we said, comic strips are not new. But there’s something about a classic comic strip that can’t be replicated. Its simplicity and ability to create a narrative quickly are unparalleled in art and design. From superhero narratives in comic books to hit the like button on comic strip social media images, we all have experienced our journey to the digital era of storytelling. However, creating a comic strip is not easy and requires a lot of patience and effort. But some tools help you create your comic strips and make the job easier. If you’re interested in creating a comic strip and want to find the best tools for your next project, keep reading to find out more.
Different Ways of Using Comic Strips
Now that you know the different uses of comic strips, it’s time to jump into the best comic strip tools list.
Canva
Canva has made its mark in the Saas industry by providing an easy-to-use media creation platform. You can create professional-looking images, banners, infographics, and video clips. So making comic strips is no exception. With Canva’s prebuild templates, you can easily create comic strips without being a graphic designer or a professional cartoonist. Select a suitable comic strip template from the readymade templates section and edit the theme style, layout, and content to match your requirements. You can even upload your comic strip characters, sketch their different mood pics, and craft interesting stories. Thankfully, Canva takes care of the fundamental grid structure, saving time arranging the sketches and establishing a better workflow.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express is a new app that includes all the capabilities of Adobe Spark and additional Photoshop features to help you ignite your creativity. With Adobe Express, you can create social media posts, banners, flyers, and logos. Guess what? You can even convert videos into GIFs. Adobe Express includes thousands of professionally designed comic strip templates, inspiring you to dive into your imagination without having to scratch the surface. The platform offers an easy way to design comic strips and share your published designs on social media channels. Once you select a matching template, you can personalize the copy by editing fonts and using stunning images. And that’s not the end! You can browse thousands of royalty-free pictures right from your Adobe Express account.
Creately
Creately is a popular platform for creating data-driven visual workflows. It offers a library of prebuilt ready-to-use comic strip templates that you can easily export in JPEG, PNG, and other sharable formats. You can select from a wide range of comic strip formats like a comic strip canvas, comic strip sequence, or comic strip series. Besides, Creately has built a library of design templates and shapes like speech balloons, captions, and facial expressions that can be dragged and dropped on the storyboard canvas to add more depth to your story.
StoryboardThat
StoryboardThat is an online comic maker platform that you can use to create complex-level comics in different niches like education, business, and personal usage. Getting started with StoryboardThat is easy, and you don’t need to be a designer to create complex comic strips. Once you click on Create a Storyboard, you can add a background scene, choose your comic characters and drag them into your strip scene. Here you get many options to select your character pose, set their skin tone color/clothing color, and set their expressions from a list of pre-set poses. One of the fantastic features of StoryboardThat is the list of filters you get for choosing the scenery, characters, prop items, speech bubbles, shapes, and many more. You’ll find almost every scene, comic star, and itinerary to bring life to your humorous imagination.
ToonyTool
Toonytool is an online comic creator tool that lets you create animations and cartoon comics for free. All you need to do is choose or upload a background, add your characters and speech bubbles, and more to create single or multiple-frame comics and combine them into one comic or animation. You can start building a comic strip by clicking on the Classic tool button at the top and selecting a background for your narration. You’ll find default backgrounds in the image library or upload custom backgrounds to complement your story characters. Fortunately, you have inbuild options for selecting characters and adding bubbles that’ll embed the conversation texts.
Smilebox
Smilebox is a media repository for finding images, slideshows, collages, flyers, and banners and also offers image-building tools. It’s user-friendly and helps you share media collaterals effortlessly with your loved ones. With Smilebox’s comic strip maker, you can select a template from over 1000 comic strip templates, including classic photo comics and trending comic styles. Then add your personal stories and download or share your comic strips via email or social media. The best thing is that you can also brand your creatives by adding a logo within the Smilebox platform. Other noteworthy features of Smilebox include access to unlimited storage, uploading music, and downloadable assets, converting videos to photographs, and creating virtual events.
Comicgen
Comicgen is a comic creator platform by Gramener, a design-led data science company. The platform is free and self-explanatory when it comes to creating comic characters. Once you visit their page, you’ll find the options for choosing an existing character or creating a new character for your comic strip. It’s useful for someone who lacks basic comic character drawing skills but believes in getting the job done. Comicgen does not come with premade templates compared to other comic strip tools. Instead, you get the input options to select the mood and pose for your comic characters. Once you save your characters, you can easily add the narration text and choose from a range of typography font options available.
Final Words
As you all know, creating a comic strip is complicated but entertaining, but when you talk about creating one that’s unique, the process becomes even more challenging. The differentiating point is you want to create a comic strip that’s exceptional because that’s what people like to see. Now that you’ve overviewed the top comic strip tools, it’s time to showcase your talent to everyone. This article explained the tools to create a comic strip that’ll make people smile today. Remember to check our list of animated character tools that’ll help you create animated characters for your next comic strip.
