Review: Creating comics goes social with Bitstrips

Bitstrips launched earlier this month as the latest new social web social 2.0 social web application to make webcomics easy. Did I mention that it was social? I was curious about the site both from a technical perspective and how it would treat comics. It was a big hit at this year’s South by South West Interactive event in Austin TX, but could it every affect the syndicated artists?

So what’s the big deal?

Bitstrips allows anyone to create a webcomic as easy as creating a Mii, or Yahoo Avatar. Friends can have fun building up caricatures of themselves and then write out a strip, gag or story about themselves. Once a comic is created, the finished product can be posted on blogs, MySpace, Facebook and a variety of other different sites. You can also leave comments, email a copy of the strip, flag it, rate it, and if the creator allows, you can even make a copy and modify it. To those with a good deal of discretionary time, this site is very sticky.

To experiment with it, here is a cartoon that I did back in 2003:

Here’s my attempt to recreate the same gag using Bitstrip:

But why would a syndicated cartoonist care about Bitstrips? In the short-term, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s too rudimentary for anyone to draw anything seriously and because the comic is hosted on their server, a creator’s ability to monetize their work is zilch. But it does do one thing better than any syndicate online offering: it allows visitors to comment, Digg, StumbleUpon, rate, or interact with other interested readers in a variety of ways. The ability to create a community is going to be paramount with the younger generations.

Here’s where it gets its kudos: It’s pretty easy to build characters and set them up in different scenes, sizes, colors, change and modify just about everything. You can create a three or four panel strip, a one panel gag or a multi-row story. And it requires no artistic ability.

Here’s where it falls short: There is no ability to change the width of the lines – it’s like drawing everything with a large sharpie. There is a limiting number of things like types of hair, clothing and scenes. If you save a character, you can’t go back and update the character – which is why my interviewee appears to be in underwear. I found it difficult to position items in the panel. Each time I tried to make the table larger, it made the characters larger as well defeating my purpose of placing them behind a large desk. And did I mention that it requires no artistic ability? Expect a lot of less than mediocre work.

The site reminds me of a point that Andy Rooney made several decades ago (and I’m paraphrasing): The computer doesn’t make us better writers, nor the microwave better cooks – it just made it easier to make lousy stuff. That said, the microwave and computer is now found in every home – the newspaper won’t always be.