Mountain Brook Schools

MakeBeliefsComix.com is easy enough for children to use, but there are enough options for adults to get a message across, too. Users can choose from 25 characters to fill a two-, three-, or four-paneled comic strip. One limiting factor is color. Though you can choose a background color, the characters remain black and white. If you’re planning on printing your comic strip, this could be a good opportunity to pull out the old-fashioned box of crayons. But if you’re planning on sharing it online, it’s a bit restricting. The pre-set options that make the site so easy to use can also be slightly limiting. Your comic strips will look pretty generic. There are only about four different expressions for each character. The upside of this is that you can finish a perfectly respectable online comic in about 10 minutes.

ToonDoo hits the fine balance between creative versatility and user friendliness, ensuring that the final results look sharp. While there’s still an extensive library of characters and objects to use in your comic strip, there are also tools to create your own touches. The TraitR tool allows you to create custom characters and DoodlR lets you paint freely. If you want to use your own photos or another image in your comic strip, you can manipulate it through the ImagineR photo tool.

Unlike other sites, there’s an option to save your project mid-creation so that you can come back to it later. When you finish a handful of ToonDoos, you can compile a book. It’s easy to embed individual cartoons in a website or share them over networks, and you can buy print-quality images of your favorites.

The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). The organizers focus on the key elements of comic strips by allowing students to choose backgrounds, characters, and props, as well as to compose related dialogue (shown at left). This versatile tool can be used by students from kindergarten through high school, for purposes ranging from learning to write dialogue to an in-depth study of a formerly neglected genre. The tool is easy to use, made even easier with the Comic Strip Planning Sheet, a printable PDF that comic creators can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final comics. After completing their comic, students have the ability to print out and illustrate their final versions for feedback and assessment.

This is the comic strip creation website for artists. The site allows for as much customization as possible without the need to build from scratch. Instead of just choosing the color of a character’s shirt, for instance, there are options to adjust the collar, shape, sleeves and size of the shirt. Instead of relying on preset poses and emotions for each character, users are able to click and drag character limbs into new postures and can customize eyes, ears, noses and hairstyles.