Comic Life

This isn’t really a product for translators. Still, I’m including it among the reviews because it has been—and continues to be—extremely useful to me.

Comic Life is an application for creating comics. It’s designed both for professionals who want to lay out their own comics and for enthusiasts who want to create a personalised keepsake.

Overall, it’s an intuitive, flexible program. To draw a comic, you start by designing the page—i.e., creating panels into which you later place images and speech balloons (“balloons” are the bubbles where characters’ lines are written). There are about a dozen balloon styles (e.g., for normal dialogue, angry voices, voice-overs, etc.).

The official website hosts a fairly active, friendly forum, which is a welcome extra. Note that discussions are practically all in English.

It’s also nice that the product is available in Spanish, and the translation is good. According to the credits, the localisation was done by the Barcelona-based company LocalVersion. Personally, I would have chosen different terms for a few items (for instance, I’d render ballon as bocadillo rather than globo), but there’s no doubt the work was done by a skilled professional.

Finally, I have contacted the Comic Life team on three separate occasions, and each time they replied not only quickly but very effectively. The last time, I suggested a new feature and they came back with a very clever way to achieve what I needed.

You can download the program and use it free of charge for 30 days, so the best thing is to try it yourself.

Version reviewed: 3.0 for Windows