You have a digital camera. You have iPhoto. You took a lot of pictures. You’ve organized them. You’ve edited them. You’ve ordered prints of them. You’ve shared them with your friends. You’ve done everything you could imagine with your pictures, right? Right?

Wrong. You haven’t met Comic Life 1.1 by Plasq. Comic Life isn’t one of those applications that you absolutely can’t live wothout, but it certainly helps make life more fun.

The premise behind Comic Life is simple. You can use it to make comics, but not just any comics. You use pictures from your iPhoto Library to create comic. The result is something that is uniquely, well, you.

Using Comic Life really quite simple. Anyone from kids to computer illiterates could figure it out and have a good time. Making a basic comic requires only two steps.
Step 1. choose a page template and drag it onto your page.

Step 2. select photos from your iPhoto Library, the Finder, or take a photo directly from your iSight or digital video camera. Drag them into cells.

That’s about all there is to it to create a basic comic strip with Comic Life:

No, in case you’re wondering, I do not have all these pets.

On top of this, you can add Core Image filters to images (even if your GPU is not Core Image capable; the CPU picks up the slack) to make some impressive-looking comics. These filters range from high-contrast to ones that make your photos look like they’re actually comics, not images. Cool. But the best part about these filters is that they are non-destructive. The photos themselves are not changed. If you don’t like the filter you used, there’s no need to go back through multiple undos or to delete what you’ve already worked on and start over; you just select another filter from the pop-up menu. Here’s my comic with the “Comicify” filter used:

But we’ve only covered some of what you can do with the images. There’s more you can do, such as colorizing the images, which tints the image to a color you specify. Again, it is non-destructable.

But what is a comic without text bubbles? Comic Life offers a wide array of text and though bubble styles to choose from:

All these elements are resizable. This particular one is rather stretchy:

Bubbles and words can also be colored:

Basically, Comic Life allows you be as expressive as you want to be. It is very, very cool.

Comic Life is also useful for other purposes. Plasq suggests using Comic Life for the following:

• Comics… duh
• Annotate family photos
• Holiday photo album
• Childrens story books
• �How-to’ Guides
• Basic desktop publishing
• Greeting cards
• Gifts
• Scrap booking

Comic Life has flexible output options. You could print it out on paper. Or you could post it on .mac. Or you can export it to HTML, images, iPhoto, or QuickTime movie. All-in-all, some useful uses and options. Comic Life also features something similar to iMovie 5’s Magic iMovie: Quick Comic. Select “Quick Comic” from the File menu, select which album you’d like to use, choose a few output options, and click “Create.” Comic Life will lay out the comic for you. All you need to do is add text bubbles and such. Sweet!

No application is perfect and Comic Life is no exception. Upon launch, Comic Life is rather slugish as it loads your iPhoto Library. I am not quite sure why this is. Quite frankly, that’s all I could find wrong with it. If some slugishness on launch is the biggest problem with an application (especially one so relatively new--version 1.1), then the developer is doing something right. Simply put, Comic Life is amazing. Despite its simple interface, it packs a lot of flexibility and it’s just plain fun! There aren’t many non-game apps out there you could say that about. Comic Life is not a must-have application in the sense that you could live without it, but you’ll be missing an awful lot. Comic Life is a great app to have if you’ve ever had the urge to have a little fun. Well done, Plasq.

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