Make A Cartoon

Think of a story, explanation or idea that you want to communicate and make it as a comic.

The tools below have characters you can use, like an alien, for example, text boxes and speech bubbles.

Why not quickly try ToonyToon, StripGenerator or MakeBeliefs to make a one panel or multi-panel cartoon?

Advanced

Once you've made some great work in the tools above, you might want to try these too.

Storyboarder and StoryboardThat are meant for creating full professional storyboards for films, but you might use it for this because it has lots of scenes and props and can export your cartoons as gifs or mp4s.

Inspiration

Cartoons can be used to make someone laugh, or explain a series of events, or even describe an argument from two points of view.

Whether you want to just have some fun, or have some serious fun, comics are worth investigating.

Comics, Narrative and the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

http://www.asor.org/anetoday/2018/09/Comics-Narrative-and-Archaeology

In this article, John Swogger shows how cartoons can be used as a way of giving public audiences a better idea of what their work entailed.

I'm a firm believer that no matter what you are working on, that simply attempting to communicate it in a medium, perhaps one you aren't familiar with is a worthwhile exercise.

The Unflattening

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unflattening-Nick-Sousanis/dp/0674744438

A dissertation in graphic novel form. Beautiful

Resources

Here are lots of places to get images that some tools will let you use?

pngimg

http://pngimg.com/
Large collection of isolated PNGs, great for making montages.

Free PDF Comics

https://www.comixology.co.uk/Free-Comics/page/175

Lots of free digital comics in PDF for you to buy for £0.00.

Comics at the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/comics?sort=-date&and[]=languageSorter%3A%22English%22

The Internet Archive has a section of

Retro Comics at ComicBookPlus

https://comicbookplus.com/

A wonderful collection of older strips, many of which are public domain.

For fun, you might, control(mac) or alt(click) to save them to your computer and edit them with Pixlr to add your own words.

Digital Comic Museum

https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/

A strange collection of retro comics from Captain Science to The H-Bomb and you.

The issues are downloadable in .cbr format for which you will need a free comic reader like YAC Reader.

Tools

Which one of these do you like best?

ToonyTool

https://www.toonytool.com/

Although having some quirks, this tool let's you easily add backgrounds, characters and speech bubbles etc, OR use the in-built collection of graphics. Simple, but I like it.