Welcome to the Comic-O-Matic Developer’s Blog!

Margo-O-Matic

Hi, all!
I’ve started this blog to help keep folks apprised of what I’m working on to make Comic-O-Matic (http://www.comicomatic.com) better! I’ll post suggestions and requests here that I get via email and FB, and let everyone know what I’m doing behind the scenes!

Comic-O-Matic is a random 3-panel comic strip generator, giving the user two random cartoon characters with random expressions in each of three panels.  You write the dialog.  If you don’t like a character or an expression, uncheck the part and make a new strip: Comic-O-Matic will give you a new random choice!

I started making Comic-O-Matic on May 9, 2011.  It is still very much in development, so I want to hear how people are using the basic features I developed – what you like, what you wish it would do, what strange things you’ve noticed (and whether you like them or not!), etc.  I am working on this all the time, and really enjoy hearing feedback, and seeing what I can do!

The artwork is by artist/cartoonist/animator/quilter Nina Paley, the creator of the animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues. Everything is released under copyleft and Creative Commons BY-SA licensing. The comic-generating script written in PHP, using ImageMagick & GD for the graphics.  The interface will eventually use a lot of Javascript, AJAX, and jQuery. The font used is by Nina Paley, who has released it under CC-BY-SA at archive.org.  I am in the process of adding international characters to it (accents, umlauts, inverted question marks & exclamation marks, etc.) and will re-release it as a true Open Font. The Comic-O-Matic scripts, when I get to a point that I feel they are stable, will be released by me via GitHub.

If you have been making comics of your own, please consider sharing them at the Comic-O-Matic Facebook page and/or the Freecomicnomics blog!

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