I’d just like to take a moment to plug Toonlet.com. It’s not perfect, but…

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing little comic strips (as you’ve seen lately) for… hell years now. But never wanted to deal with the work. It was Toonlet.com that finally got me off my ass to do it. Now, I’m not actually using Toonlet.com to generate them, but that’s not the point. The point is that they make it easy and fun to put together your own strip with unique characters. You create a character by bringing up an “art pack” which is a collection of heads, bodies, arms, eyes, etc., and combining them to create characters that you save for later use. This is very cool and allows for a ton of possible combinations, but honestly, I just don’t like the drawing style of their initial art packs. It’s too high-school notebook looking. Fortunately, that’s all about to change because they’ve just made it possible for anyone to add a new art pack. Everyone gets to use the various components in a pack that you upload, but that’s ok, because it’s unlikely that they’ll use them in the same combinations that you will.

Playing around with Toonlet is what made me realize that it really didn’t require that much effort to put together a strip. I’m doing it all from scratch with Inkscape but after doing so I have found that I get a little kick out of seeing my strip on a page. Enough that I’ll spend the time to make whatever new poses, facial expressions, etc. for new strips. Of course, because I’m using Inkscape it means I’ll have a library of things that I can recombine later to save time making new strips. Just like Toonlet (and ever other vector art comic strip you’ve ever seen).

There are a handful of things that suck about Toonlet, and unfortunately they’re pretty big:

1) While you have great control over your characters, can save sets of them in various moods, and outfits, you’ve got absolutely zero control of placement and the size of the character is relative to the amount of text. This results in almost unrecognizably small characters when you have a lot of text in a panel.

2) You can only have one character in a panel. This means that two characters can never talk to each other in the same panel.

3) No preview mode.

4) While you can create a set of moods for a character if you ever want to ad a new mood to the set you can’t just bring up and change an existing one of yours. You have to remember and recreate the exact combination of all the other elements that went into making that character and then hope you got it right because there’s no delete character either.

5) It doesn’t work in Safari. Creative types have been enamored with Apple for years. To not support the primary browser on the operating system that creative types tend to prefer is mind-boggling to me.

And now you see why I decided to do it from scratch.

I considered, very briefly, using Stripgenerator but they’ve got the opposite problems. You’ve got total control over what’s in a panel, you can even use painfully crude collections of shapes to “draw” new things, but you can’t save anything for re-use later. There’s no way to create a new character that you could re-use without having to redraw it from scratch every time, and the users are insane. The people behind StripGenerator were/are considering adding the ability for people to draw (with a mouse / tablet) and a lot of users were actually arguing against adding it. Saying that it would destroy the look of things. Why would you ever want to force your strip to look like everyone else’s or limit yourself to drawing by pasting and rotating 1/4 arcs and squares and such?

I think The guys over at Toonlet have their priorities straight. Make it as easy as possible to let people make comic strips then add features that will give users more choice and control. They’re working on the issue of only one character per panel. Personally I think they should browse over to Stripgenerator and steal ideas from the strip creation UI. Right now it’s SO easy to create a strip at Toonlet that people comment on other strips by making comment strips. It’s amazing.

To give you an idea, here is a Toonletized version of this post’s main points (Mac users should check out the note afterwards):

P.S. In case you’re considering using Inkscape on the Mac, I’d recommend not. While it is rock-solid under Linux something about running X11 apps under OS X means it’ll crash if you do things like accidentally click too fast or, well, it seems any rapid sequence of operations involving the mouse will kill it. I’m downloading a demo of LineForm now which looks very promising and is only $80. If it has good export capabilities I’ll probably buy it because I prefer using OS X for anything that isn’t code. VectorDesigner is probably the most affordable commercial Vector graphics software for the Mac but unfortunately it will only export bitmaps, so there’s no way for you, or anyone else, to leverage any of your vector based creations in any other app. I refuse to use software that will lock me in and never let me change to something else as my needs change so this is a deal-breaker for me.