Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Thing 38: Comic Relief

This week we will have some fun with our work and play around at making comic strips. I've discovered there are a lot of online comic strip makers and some you can even upload your own pictures to play with. I'll list all of them at the end but will focus on ToonDoo from Jambav which is where I like to play. When I mentioned this to Helene B the other day she told me about Shelf Check, a series of Library comics available on ToonDoo. Here's the latest Shelf Check latest post, just position your mouse over it and move to control the image, no clicking needed:








The website runs in Flash so be sure you have the latest version to get the full options. If you are a bit out of date you can create using their images but to uplaod your own to your gallery you need the latest versions of your web browser and Flash player.

After talking to Helene I started searching for Library related comic strips and there are a lot of them in ToonDoo, including a couple of my own. What I was very pleased to see is a few that seemed to be geared to the public. this one looks like someone wanted a unique welcome sign.








However, I had fun letting my cats play using one photo from the Picnik play a couple weeks ago.









Other online comic makers are:
Make Beliefs - targeted to kids
Read Write Think - Kids again
Comeeko - loves MySpace
Stripgenerator - made for blogs
Strip Creator

So for this week's Discovery exercise.
1. Go to ToonDoo or one of the other strip makers listed above
2. Find a couple library related comics you like.
3. email, create a del.icio.us bookmark, or embed it in your blog
4. Sign up and create your own comic on whatever you want
5. Don't forget to write about your experience in your blog.

1 comment:

Emily Lloyd said...

Thanks for the mention! If you're interested, Shelf Check can also be viewed at shelfcheck.blogspot.com --the RSS feed is easier to subscribe to from there than from ToonDoo. (Isn't it great, by the way, that ToonDoo has a tag cloud for searching for comics? I look at the other cartoons labeled "library" and "book" all the time--hadn't thought about using ToonDoo to create, for ex, a library welcome sign--what a smart idea!)