George WebberArtist - Cartoonist - Illustrator

Drawing & Making Comics on the iPad 

So the question is, can a comic book created or better still a printable comic book be made entirely on the Apple iPad?

Well so far the answer seems to be Yes, No, Sort of, Maybe. Confused?, ya me too.

Ok, so let me give you the break down. The first step was coming up with a short all be it stupid story, not too tough for a headcase like me.

Next you'll need some Art, this is where thing can get tricky as the iPad can be great for drawing but still has limitations, if you don't try to go too wild it'll work.

I used Apps like Brushes and Sketchbook Pro to draw a few random Batman test images while testing those apps (there are several others that work quite well too, but I'll get into that another time).

So I've got some Batman sketches I've done on the iPad and a few photos of a lady freind (Natasha Yi) that I downloaded off the web in Safari onto the iPad.

Next I need Panels, Word Balloons and Text.

All three of these I managed in a App called CartoonStrip CS, CartoonStrip is still pretty new and has a ways to go before it's a real comic book maker, but it has the basic tools to pull it off, not bad for a Version 1.01 App.

NOTE: CartoonStrip only does Horizontal pages at this time!

So, CartoonStrip ... just select a template page of panels, get your images from the iPads Albums by clicking on the "X' in the panels, move scale and rotate the images as you please.

Sadly you can only scale UP and not down, nor can you put more than one image in a panel as there's no Alpha Channels or Layers, it would be pointless anyway.

Next put in some Word Balloons and type some text. The "Tail" of the Word Balloons can be grabbed and dragged to any place and length ... although it does take some practice to get the "tail" and not the picture.  It would be nice if you could "lock" the pictures in place, but that's not an option either at this time. 

NOTE: Once you save a Page in CartoonStrip, it becomes a jpg and can no longer be edited. So be sure everything it right before you save or you'll have to make the page all over again. I know I had to make several pages two or three times to get them 100% right.

You can read my goofy comics pages here , then continue to read the rest of the story.

Just click the cover image to open it and click arrows to change pages.

OK, so that's the comic pages look as they come out of CartoonStrip.

The images are iPad Screen Resolution JPGs, so they can be printed and look ok, not fabulous super crisp high res, but not too bad either. I quite was surprized at how they looked, I didn't expect anything much given I had streched some images quite a bit. But they where pretty good.

For the next step I had to go out of the iPad and into the computer in order to make a PDF file from all my pages. I'm not aware of a PDF writter App at this time, if there is, then even more of the process can be done in the iPad, which would be great.

Anyway, it was a simple task, just rename the images in page order 01, 02, 03, etc and make a multi page PDF.

Setting the PDF to print a Booklet was fairly brainless too (borrowed the use of a nice high end laser printer for two sided printing, sweet )

Finally if you have the iBooks app on you iPad you can drag and drop your PDF into iTunes under Books and Presto! your PDF will go to your iPad (after a sync) and you can read you comic on your iPad.

Pretty freakin' cool if I do say so myself

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