I've been playing with a few comic making applications for my mobile devices. With a mobile application, you can leave out having to use a computer to make a simple comic and you can do the entire process from taking the picture to uploading the finished comic directly from your smartphone. The main drawback is you can't make spiffy special effects like you could on a desktop so the comics will need to be simple compared to what you can produce otherwise. However, for those who don't need snazzy effects or just need something quick and simple, this can be the ideal method of making comics without having to spend a whole lot of time. The above two comics were produced using My Comic Photo Free and My Comic for Windows Phone 7 on a Lumia 710.
My Comic is about as simple as it gets. You get a choice of a few word balloons/boxes and a couple of font sizes and that's it. You only get one panel and it leaves a watermark in the lower right corner. But it's totally free and supports both landscape and portrait.
My Comic Photo Free is the free version of My Comic Photo. It has much more variety with support for different layouts featuring multiple panels as well as different word balloon types and fonts. Some of the features, especially most of the word balloons, are locked but even then you can make a pretty decent looking comic. The main negative for this app is a surprising lack of landscape support.
The above is made using ComicBook! for iOS on iPod Touch 4. ComicBook! is probably the best comic app I've tried. The only problem is that the iPod Touch's camera really sucks and is a far cry from my Lumia. The app itself is fully featured with support for different layouts, fonts, landscape/portrait, and also image stamps to post sound and image effects with support for importing your own image stamps. I'd be using this a lot more if the iPod actually had a half decent camera. The image used above isn't even from the iPod's camera and would actually look far worse if it was. :p
Main reason I've been playing around with those software is because I've come to the ugly realization that I lack the time and energy to make comics like I used to due to my current job. I still have an interest to do photo comics but I have to change the direction I take for future comics since long winded stuff is pretty much out of the question. Keep it simple, I should.
