Comiqs: For your Online Comic Life

Thanks to John at Creative ICT for directing me to this really nice online comic strip creator. Called Comiqs, the environment is much more flexible than others I have visited, and mentioned so far, and in many ways is Comic Life Like, in how it is presented and works.


Within Comiqs, you can search for flickr images or upload your own photos and doodles to use, add additional pages and choose from a variety of page layouts and templates. Using the tools and uploaded images in your comic strip is a matter of dragging them from the palette space to the left of the screen, onto the work space where they can be resized and moved around. The Graphic tab, is where the page layouts can be found along with a collection of call outs and the caption box. Dragging these to the workspace and double clicking allows text to be added. To make my playtime easier and shorter I copied text from a file of Homerisms I already had, and pasted these to the bubbles. Not greatly creative on my part, but I did do a little something more with this one.

Completed comics can be saved to your personal space and then embedded in the slide show format below to your blog or webspace using provided embed code.


playing with Comiqs from twowhizzy on Comiqs

I am a big fan of comic strips, their potential as multimodal learning and literacy tools. Comic Life mentioned above and in several other posts, is a local application available for both PC and Mac. It has helped I and my students to write classroom learning stories, and played a key role as a data analysis and presentation tool, helping make sense of interactions in classroom based Video Data collected for my research project. This environment I think is amazing in that it utilises similar affordances and tools, as a web based environment, allowing direct sharing of content to the web, via other web2.0 services. I will certainly be considering how I can use this space with my students to support our blogging adventures, but without losing touch with Comic Life for other things. Having just visited the plasq site, I was interested to find the latest incarnation of Comic Life, Magiq, and to see versions of the tool now available for the iPhone and iTouch. Unfortunately Comic Life magiq is only available for the Mac, but I've embedded the video here for those who might be interested.