This is the third of three reviews where we discuss and demonstrate comic strip generator websites.  The first was about StripGenerator.com.  The second was about Pixton.com.

ToonDoo.com

ToonDoo.com is the next generation of comic strip creators.  It takes what StripGenerator and Pixton do and brings it up several notches with excellent usabilty, powerful features, and a fun look-and-feel.

Like Pixton, ToonDoo gives the user the ability to create your own characters with absolutely no drawing skills.  Called Traitr (not the best name IMHO), you can select your characters’ basic traits (hair, eye color and size, facial hair, clothing, body type, etc.) and adjust them with clicks of the mouse.  Probably the most unique tool is the positioning of the eyeballs.  If you want your character to look left, move the eyeballs left; to have him look right, move them right.  A very simple tool, it provides a lot of expressive capabilities for the drawing-challenged like me.  It’s way cool.

After you’ve created your character you can bring them into your gallery.  From here you drag and drop them into your strip from which you can still make adjustments to eye direction, expression, and tons of other traits.   In essence, the Traitr tool creates a template where you can adjust some of the attributes as your strip calls for it.  The whole Traitr system gives users the ability to quickly create unique characters and modify them just as quickly.

In comparison to Pixton, Traitr is much easier to use, but somewhat more limiting.  Whereas in Pixton you can adjust the posture in an infinite number of ways, ToonDoo’s Traitr only gives you a handful of choices.  Click on the arms and drag your mouse in Pixton and you can move them as precisely as your mouse moves.  In contrast, ToonDoo’s Traitr only allows you to click on a “posture” button which scrolls you through a handful of options.  ToonDoo’s is much easier to use but at the cost of flexibility.

Besides Traitr, ToonDoo has lots of “canned” characters and objects.  From people, to bears, you can add them to your strip at will, resize, and rotate.  You cannot adjust their characteristics like a Traitr character.  Still, the additional art gives you a much larger palette to make your strip unique.

ToonDoo also allows you to upload any image you want.  So if the don’t like the bear or the characters created in Traitr,  make one of your own in Photoshop and upload it to system. This feature alone makes ToonDoo stylistically unique and gives a user unlimited creative freedom over Pixton and StripGenerator.

ToonDoo also has excellent community features with voting, commenting, and extensive sharing.  An especially neat feature is the ReDoo it where  you can take what an artist creates, copy it completely, and rewrite it the way you want.  Like the strip but think the colors are off? ReDoo it.  Want to change its dialog?  ReDoo it.  This feature could help strips extend the conversation.  Just like YouTube enables respondents via video, ToonDoo’s ReDoo could potentially allow strip responses with strips.  It’s very powerful and very cool.

All in all, ToonDoo is defintely the most feature-laden of all of the strip creation websites reviewed, and is also one of the easiest to use.  While it may not have all of the customizations that Pixton has in its character generator engine, it makes up for the lack with a very comprehensive toolset and the ability to upload your own artwork.

All three strip creation tools reviewed in this series will get even the most novice users creating strips.  So, what are you waiting for?

The lightbulb is the punchline. So what’s the best number of panels to use to get there? Of course you know it can depend. Assuming we’re talking about the typical newspaper strip format, let’s explore what panel count does to a strip. A comic strip is limited in size so breaking the space down into different segments creates different experiences for the reader. We’ll talk about single panel strips another time so let’s focus on the common 2, 3 and 4 panel comics.

This isn’t the “rule” for all strips but it’s worth thinking about when laying out a comic. Generally speaking, larger panels denote a longer period of time and smaller ones will portray a more rapid procession of time. The examples below have no content at all so you can see what panel size and count alone can do for the reader experience.

Strip A seems to take longer while C feels like several short segments of time. This is the result of panel count AND panel size. Four panels the size of A would feel different than the four in C. But there isn’t room for four larger panels so the decisions of panel size are crucial to the pacing of your strip.

This does differ from comic books because books have more leeway with layout. Comic strips however, have different space and time challenges. Mixing up panel sizes within a strip can give you great freedom to encourage the pace of your reader’s experience. Now throw some content in there, your characters and dialog, and you’ve got an even more complex system of time progression.

Do you experiment with panel sizes to guide the reader to the lightbulb?