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Retool 0003 — Description

No spell or grammar checking in the boxes, and the word wrap is manual with hard returns. That is tough going for a text-heavy series. But, UV Cube has a point; comics with paragraphs of text are a slog to read, and you should be leveraging the medium of images and action.

Three panels in, and I am getting comfortable. Clip Studio requires you to label everything and make sure you know what you are creating and where you are creating it. The panel cuts on an angle are neat, but I did squares here as a test. Clip Studio is a more methodical program, far more organized and careful. But the workflow is slower.

If anything, Clip Studio is a great program to fall back on and keep working with. I see Comic Life has gone on to version 4, but only on the Mac? Maybe they are giving up on Windows, and I would not blame them. I am 50% on Linux for my workflow as it is.

Humor strips or more novel-like strips may still need Comic Life at this point, until the text tools get a little better in Clip Studio. Exporting in lossless image format and locking the size to 2560x1600 will keep them Amazon-ready, no matter what layout program I use for a series.

Bet there are some great lessons learned here. One is that I have a fallback program for layout, and I am trained in it. The second is that the 2560x1600 tall or wide format at 300 dpi should be considered the comic-standard format, not just for my work, but for anyone wanting to be on Amazon Kindle. This protects me from censorship issues, and also pre-formats every series I do for release there.

The multi-panel format is engaging. This is the first time I done this for a strip, and I usually do single-panel pages. The image size for smaller panels like this is 2-3 times smaller than a full 4K image, so those render much faster, but there's much less room for long text boxes.

There is also a lot more "change up" in panels like this, especially with different camera angles. As a result, it looks more dynamic and engaging, especially with the zoom and camera changes. Even if a few series stay in Comic Life, I will adopt this page size and multi-panel format.

A day off like this is a time for learning, training, and experimentation.

-Ren