Creating comics

Comics are created in Comic Strip Factory in a comic window, which looks like this:

The top half of the window contains your comic. To find out how we got this far, read the chapter on Starting a comic .

A comic always has a current panel, where editing is currently taking place. This is the panel that has its outline highlighted in blue. You can change the current panel just by clicking in another one, or by dragging objects from panel to panel. Objects can only be selected in one panel at a time, so the Select All command, in the comic editor, means select all of the objects in the current panel .

Actually, each panel of the comic has a foreground and a background layer. You can change which layer you are editing with the Edit Layer control just above the comic, on the left. When you are editing in the foreground layer, you can still see what is in the background layer, but you can’t select it. This is the main advantage of having two layers, because not being able to select what is in the background makes it easier to work with the foreground objects. When you are in the background layer, the foreground layer is just visible as a ghost image, and nothing in the foreground layer can be selected. So Select All in a comic really means select all objects in the current layer of the current panel. For more about working with layers, see Adding backgrounds .

There is another control over the view in the comic editor, next to the Edit Layer control, called Focus on . Normally, you will focus on the comic. But focusing on the comic has some limitations. A panel in a comic may contain objects that are partially or completely invisible to you because they are clipped to the edge of the panel. To be able to see all of the contents of the current panel, click Panel in this control. This has a few effects. All other panels will be drawn with a gray striped overlay on them, and they are locked. And you can’t change the current panel in this mode. But the clipping for the current panel is turned off, so you can see all of the objects in the panel, even if they are actually outside of its bounds, and they aren’t cut off at the panel’s edge. To return to the normal comic view and editing behavior, click Comic in the Focus on control.

The bottom half of the window is a tabbed view which initially contains two tabs: Central Casting and Scenery . These tabs show the catalogs that are available to you for character and background art to use in your comic. The catalogs contain thumbnail images of the different character or background files available. Clicking on a thumbnail opens up that character or background (these are the two kinds of parts files) into a new tab. The additional tabs that are open in your comic, beyond Central Casting and Scenery, comprise the library of art for your comic. The comic file remembers what is open in your library so you don’t have to go looking for them all again when you open the same comic file later. For information about using the art in your comic’s library, see Importing characters and Adding backgrounds .

If you want more space for editing your comic and don’t need to copy in any parts at the moment, you can collapse the bottom half of the window by clicking in the selected tab. You can open up that bottom view again by clicking in any tab.

Other comic editing tasks you can learn about are: