What self-respecting video-game player can honestly say they have never read a comic book? But let’s take it a step further – how many of you have wished you could create your own comic book?

Well, get ready, boys and girls, cuz there is a simple-to-use program that will allow you to create your very own comic book faster than you can say drag and drop. Planetwide Games is the publisher behind Comic Book Creator (the developer is Self-Publishing Software), a program that will allow anyone to take screen shots from a game and work them into a comic book, complete with text bubbles. Have a hankering for other images to use in a comic book? That is no problem either. If you have a scanner or another way to access those images, this program will allow you import images into a comic book panel, drop in chat bubbles and create your own story.

And really, nothing could be easier to use. The game does use drag-and-drop technology and a user-friendly wizard to achieve what paginated newspapers (and other printed media) refer to as WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get … well, more or less.

Open the wizard to create a new comic book. There are 6 initial layout looks, but open the ‘more choices’ tab and there are 103 extra layout options, ranging from a simple few panels to a page brimming with 22 panels and more. Create your book, and then begin to create your story. Of course, you will need images, but that is no problem. Control-I will allow you to access your computer system and browse files to find the images, from images burned to a disk to screenshots saved in folders of your favorite games.

You click on a folder and a panel on the left side displays all the available images. Simply grab one and drag it into the appropriate panel and voila, you are well on your way to creating your own story. You can adjust the viewable area, right click to clear the picture. Then add simple text effects within chat bubbles that you have dragged into the frame.

The program comes with art you can add, complete with clipping paths (which means the images are cutout so you can overlay them on backgrounds) and text is so easy to add. Have images from the soccer season? Weave them into a different retelling of Star Wars Episode IV.

Granted this program is simplicity itself, but that does not diminish from the fun that can be had.

Shift-insert allows you to add pages to your book and the tool bar at the top of the program window will allow you to jump between pages effortlessly.

Drawbacks? Very few. Ok, the font effects are limited, but if you have a program like Photoshop, you can create and import some nice effects. And sure, there are not a wide range of selections for the bubbles, but what is there is well done. Remember a few simple ideas though, and you will be able to breeze through this program with ease. For example, once you drop the background image, that is base layer, and other elements will lay on top. While you can right click you cannot send anything back behind your base layer.  The program also comes with a finite amount of fonts, but you may be able to add True Type fonts into the base program’s font folder to round that out. And there does not appear to be anyway to preplan your book electronically. That is a shame, Creating a master thumbnail design sheet would have been very handy here.

But all that aside, the Comic Book Creator is simple to use and a lot of fun to play with. If you have any creative juices, wish to visually manufacture your own epic story or just entertain yourself with whacky tales – using either photographs or artwork, this is a program that will allow that to happen.

Gameplay: 9.0
This is very simple to use, featuring drag-and-drop technology. Importing images is easy.

Graphics: 8.0
What is here is a little skimpy and importing cutout images would require knowledge of a program to make clipping paths. Not everything is that easy.

Sound: N/A
This is not applicable.

Difficulty: Easy
That about says it all – this is a very simple program to use.

Concept: 9.2
Brilliant idea that is well executed.

Overall: 9.0
There are a few things that may have been added to make it a deeper experience, but generally this is an excellent program for doing a wide range of story-telling.