Our Chief Artist (amongst other Chief things), Steve Lowtwait, has created designs that embrace the change sweeping the comic strip world including “Power to the Cartoonist” and “Free the Comic Strip.”

We have a variety of products including shirts, hats, mousepads, aprons, and lots of other stuff.  We have men’s, women’s, and children’s styles for nearly everything.

So, head on over to the ZingerStore. Your soul will thank you.

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?

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

Pixton.com

Pixton recently generated some buzz at the South-By-Southwest interactive festival in Austin last month.

What makes Pixton really interesting is the amazing control you have over the characters.  Using the expression editor, for example, you can make your character smile, show fear, or express other emotions.  For people like me who can’t draw, this functionality is liberating.  I have made many stick figures in my life but have always fallen short of truly showing angst, hatred, or bliss.  With Pixton, I can do much more and all I have to do is select the words of the expression.  It’s very neat.

Similarly, there are editors for colors, clothing style, skin tone, girth, posture, and many more.  With Pixton, I don’t have to move lines or have any of the technical skills to make my character look fat.  I just do a few clicks and voila, my character is fat.

Although possibilities are limitless it comes at a significant cost of usability: there are so many controls, it was often hard to figure out how to use it.   The learning curve is much steeper than StripGenerator.com. Plan to spend some time with the interface to get used to it.

Another drawback to Pixton is that you are confined to create strips within their design parameters.  In other words, while you can make lots of changes to your characters and your strips, you cannot import your own designs.  Not only does it give all Pixton strips a very similar look and feel, it limits artists that want to push the envelope on the look and feel of their strips.

From a community perspective, however, Pixton excels. You can comment, vote, and share each strip.  This functionality seems pretty robust and up to par with other community systems (read: YouTube).

Overall, Pixton, is a great way for beginners to explore the comic strip creation world.  True artists might hit a wall with their creativity but for the rest of the stick figure drawing world, it gives us new levels of power and control.

Next Up: Toon Doo!

Wired Magazine’s blog recently posted a great post about cool tech comic strips for 2008.   Some of the subjects covered included:

1. Proposed Yahoo! purchase by Microsoft
2. Google’s dominance
3. Cell Phone bans in cars

It always amazes me how a simple picture can speak volumes.   In this world where snapping a photo (and sharing it) is as easy as answering the phone, a comic strip provides a perfect prism to see the world a little less than perfectly.

We’ve all heard about how the Presidential candidates have earned millions of dollars through their websites. Some have even credited Barack Obama’s successful candidacy for the Democratic nomination on it.

But a little State Representative election in Kansas is attracting attention for the Web comic strip that has raised nearly $100,000 for an unlikely candidate.

Sean Tevis, a web designer, created a “stick-figure” comic strip to virally spread the word about his candidacy and the challenges that he is having being Democrat in a very Republican region of the state. Through his inventive strip where he explains how if 3000 people gave him a little over $8 a piece, he could earn the minimun $26,000 a consultant told him he needed to successfully run a campaign against the Republican incumbant. His politically charged comic strip, labeled 3000, he made the callout to the web to get him the money he needs.

The web replied with over 3 times that amount, $96,000, with nearly most of the money coming from outside the state.

Talk about the power of the pen (or strip)!

NPR’s Morning Edition ran this story today.

Your Zingerpals have been working really hard in the skunkworks to give the world a new introduction to the future of comic strips. In the coming weeks we will be introducing a new Zingerding.com.

While we think our current site is cool (I personally coded it) and has done a good job of collecting names, we think our new one will be better. Here’s a sneak peak of what the site will look like:

New Zingerding.com Home Page

The new site will hopefully better convey the message about what we’re trying to build such as:

• THE community for comic strips artists around the world. A place where artists can share their ideas, promote their work, and even earn money for their effort.
• THE community for comic strip fans to enjoy the deepest and best collection of comic strips anywhere.

Our goal is to get a massive list of people who are interested in being involved. This site is going to help make this community happen.