Adobe Comic Blast

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
September 12, 2023
2 replies
922 views

Just curious if anyone knows about or remembers Comic Blast, in 2020 it was suppposed to "change the way comics are created and displayed". It disappeared and i can't find anything on it. Was it replaced with something else? Or just killed?

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rayek.elfin

Legend

Comic Blast was an interesting attempt to design a tool for comic artists, but unfortunately got a LOT of things wrong - not the least the process. And the end results looked amateurish. Initial reactions were not favourable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_keY6WgQ2c

Interactive animated comics were a fad around 2010 or so, and Smith Micro released MotionArtist to cater for that market. Comic Blast was supposed to share similar simple animated effects and limited interactivity. As anyone can tell: animated interactive comics never got off the ground.

Comic Blast is an interesting quirky software experiment in the history of design software.

I assume Adobe meant Comic Blast to compete with the likes of Clip Studio Paint EX (which is the standard for comic work). If you @HippocampusArts are interested in software dedicated for comic creation, I would suggest Clip Studio Paint EX. It's superb.

T

Tina32489935saxg

Inspiring

Do they have another way of converting your pictures to comics?

rayek.elfin

Legend

It's not really a matter of "converting" your pictures. A comic book page layout is planned ahead and then panels are drawn/designed.

The only software Adobe offers that could help in laying out the pages would be InDesign. But there are no freehand bitmap drawing tools in InDesign, and the software (while excellent for general purpose layout work) is less than optimal for comics work. You'd also have to switch between Photoshop and InDesign all the time, which breaks the flow.

The best software for comics work is simply Clip Studio Paint EX.
https://www.clipstudio.net/en/

A good free and open source alternative would be Krita https://krita.org/

It is used by David Revoy for his comic: https://www.peppercarrot.com/

Of course, Photoshop could be used as well. But both with Krita and Photoshop you would need another app to collect the pages in one file. I have used PhotoLine for this (due to its superior 1bit bitmap support).

But to be honest: nothing beats Clip Studio Paint EX for comic work. Everything you need is right there in one environment.