When I purchased P8, I got a 25% off coupon for my next SmithMicro purchase. Today I got a sale email for Anime Studio 6 Debut for 29.99.

They say Anime Studio is for "cartoons" as well as animations, but I'm a bit confused - are they talking basically about animated cartoons, then? I think I'd be more interested in comic software (text bubbles etc), and I can't tell from the Anime Studio page whether it can do that.

Can anyone give me a bit of a description of the difference between Anime Studio and Manga Studio? I don't really have time to download and play with two demos at the moment....

While we're at it, what is the difference between anime and manga, anyway? (Please don't stone me for my ignorance; I'm kinda old to be up on this.)

Anime Studio is designed to make animations of various kind, mostly like Flash-style animations or short cartoons. It's not for making comics. Manga Studio is designed mostly for people who actually draw comics using a tablet or scan in sketches and then ink them digitally. It's OK for making comics, but from what I understand, you still have better options (especially regarding color) in something like Photoshop or Illustrator.

As for anime and manga, anime is Japanese animation. Manga are printed comics of all kinds, including ones aimed at housewives and businessmen as well as children and young adults.

Hope that helps!

SnowS

Thanks, SnowS!

Re comics: what I kinda had in mind was creating images in Poser and importing. So my use of the app would mostly be for formatting and adding text etc, rather than drawing per se.

Manga Studio is designed to allow you to completely draw comics from scratch. Think of a specialized photoshop.

The latest version of Manga Studio has greatly improved color handling. You can now import color pictures into panels. The previous version would only import color pics into the background layer.

The last few pages of Issue two of my webcomic were done with Manga Studio

kd.dynip.com/Boudica/Boudica_2.htm

A program called Comic Book Creator is more in line with what you're looking for, I think. It allows you to create comics with word balloons, an array of different panels and can export either as pdf, jpeg or other formats. Unfortunately, as I look at their site - planetwidegames.com - I'm not sure it's still available in this format. Looks like it's more designed now to create content for placing on the web.

There still might be a source for the original program. Cheap at around $30.

Believable:

I looked for the same thing for a while.  I finally settled on Comic Life from Plasq.com.  It does exactly what you described, and I think quite well.  You can drag and drop your images from a directory into frames, then add text bubbles, etc.  There is a lot of functionality to change the fonts, colors, sizes.  The text auto centers in the bubbles, which is the key factor for work flow.

It's got a couple of rough edges, but the pick of the litter from what I've seen.

There are both PC and Mac versions.  Twenty five bucks for the standard and thirty bucks for the advanced version (more fonts, templates and pre-designed styles).

Klebnor

I think I looked at Comic Life. IIRC, the Windows version (I'm a Windows user) is far less fully-featured than the Mac.

I got Anime Studio in the brief period the older version was free. It looks like it can do Anime, but if I have it right, you assemble bits and pieces to make people, models, and animation. It's on my ever-growing list of 'programs to get around to', especially since another group gave out Paintshop Pro at the same time...;)

Well, I don't own any apple products - don't support the closed architecture philosophy.

Works fine on my windows PC.

Klebnor

Comiclife has NO competition for panel layout and word balloon styles IMHO
I used it for the Digital Comic in my Sig link.

Cheers

I gave up on comic life because the exported output was always slightly blurry.

Then I got Manga Studio 4 and I haven't looked back, so the problem may have been fixed since then. It was a known bug at the time.

Quote - I gave up on comic life because the exported output was always slightly blurry.

Then I got Manga Studio 4 and I haven't looked back, so the problem may have been fixed since then. It was a known bug at the time.

Im running the deluxe Version of Comiclife
All my pages I exported to 300 dpi tiffs looked great
but then again my source material was hi res toon renders
from C4D so that does make a difference I suppose

Cheers