| The Funny Pages |
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| Thursday, 23 July 2009 00:00 | |
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I'm going to talk about 3 of my favorite comic-creator tools to get students inspired about writing. If you're at all in doubt about the value and depth of comics, go hunt down two very good books by Scott McCloud: "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art " and "Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels" and you will develop a new appreciation for an art and literary form that hasn't always had the warmest reception in schools. Comics or graphic novels are increasingly being brought into schools to encourage literacy. Students find them familiar and inviting and they work the brain as they demand focus on the visual and verbal at the same time. The first tool is brought to us by Bill Zimmerman: makebeliefscomix.com. This site makes it incredibly easy to create two, three, or four panneled comics, using pre-drawn characters and drag-and-drop speech/thought balloons. Presently, there are 15 different characters to choose from (from people to talking dogs), each having 4 different sketches showing different poses/emotions. The characters can easily be re-sized and flipped, offering a lot of possibilities for the creator. There aren't any backgrounds or objects, but I appreciate the simplicity of the site, focusing students on the dialog between characters. Bill includes some great "story starters" for generating ideas for "make belief" writing. The site has just had a major upgrade bringing Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and even Latin to its languages. Saving and printing is a snap. My next favorite site is Pixton. With Pixton, your creativity can move up a notch as you design comics in a flashbased creator. The sky's the limit to the complexity of your comic. You can have multiple panels and you build each character from multiple attributes as well as have the ability to "bend" at their natural joints to create poses that make them much more interesting than simple stick figures. There are many sample poses that you can select and modify for your story's needs as well as different pre-made expressions for each character. Clothes and color can be selected and there are plenty of props and backgrounds to populate the scenes with. Just like makebeliefscomix.com, you simply type into the speech bubbles to give your characters voice. Pixton offers 30 different languages and is for "all ages." Because it is for "all ages," and other users' creations are able to be browsed and remixed, Pixton may not be appropriate for most grades. However, Pixton now offers an education version that ---for a fee--- provides a safe, customizable, virtual classroom for teachers and students to work in. Students are able to have accounts without needing an email address and their work is password protected. There are different licensing choices, but for a classroom of 23 students for an 8 month school year, it would run you around $400. My third favorite tool is Plasq's Comic Life. Unlike the 2 previous tools, this one is software rather than web-based but is available for both Macintosh and PCs for just under $20 or $300 for 25 seats. There is a dizzying array of features in Comic Life, with numerous templates for layout and dozens of styles for each element placed on the page. Photos can easily be filtered to look "comicized" with a click of a button. Speech/thought balloons can have multiple tails, fonts can be changed, you can create " bendable comic lettering", and can even capture stills from your iSight camera (Mac) or Webcam/DV Cam (PC). Everything is "drag and drop" and can be locked down for easy layout. Multiple pages can be created, inviting creation of graphic novels from your prolific writers and can be printed or easily exported to web pages. All three sites help "level the playing field" for those of us who believe we can't draw, alleviating that barrier to getting down to the writing. Comics could be the perfect vehicle to get your reluctant writers' writing. Comments (1)
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We're proud to be included in your roundup of comic strip creators and hope you'll give MakeBeliefsComix.com a try for the new school year. We truly welcome feedback from you and your students on how the site can be more fun and useful to you in encouraging writing, reading and storytelling. We've also added a printables feature on the site where you can print out fun drawings to encourage writing, drawing and creative thinking, and there is a Writer's Prompt section, too, to encourage writing. Please encourage your students to write to us and we'll print some of their work on the site.
Yours sincerely,
Bill Zimmerman
Creator, MakeBeliefsComix.com and author, Pocket Doodles for Kids