Bitstrips - Comics Made Easy

But there's more. The Bitstrips creators knew right up front that they were building a social web application. They knew their users would enjoy talking to each other, learning from each other - as well as teaching, collaborating on comic strips, remixing others' strips, and socializing. Becoming a community. They've made it all quite easy to do, with sidebar status updates, email, and commenting.

Express your approval of a strip (or disapproval,) or let the author know that you laughed out loud with the ratings system of laughs and groans.

Not fond of adult content strips? You can filter those out, as well as flag those strips that contain mature or offensive content.

Share the strips you make by either embedding the flash strip on your blog or webpage, or display an image of it (which is how I've done it here on Squidoo.)

Bitstrips' special comic viewer works great for embedding your strips in blogs and webpages. It will automatically resize your strip so you don't lose the full impact. On multi-pane comics, each frame is displayed separately, like a slideshow, with a final display of the entire comic at the end. You can see the comic viewer in action here. Click on the gray arrow to see the next frame.

You can email your strips to your friends too, or share them on more than 2 dozen other social networks including Reddit, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Google, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo!, My Web, Windows Live, Propeller, Slashdot, Newsvine and more.

How about creating your own not-for-business cards via Bitstrips?

What happens when the comic authors, their avatars, the comics themselves and the memes get all mixed up together?

You get multi-person series like The Starinator!

Kathy & Dare have been battling wills in a staring contest for weeks now. Will Kathi or Dare eventually win? There's no frontrunner - yet! (Be sure to click on the comics to see the accompanying comments by the authors.)

I call what I do, for the most part, strip painting. I enjoy creating scenery with Bitstrips - which sometimes is quite a challenge. Bitstrips uses a small store of props, and it's been fun to do, and to watch fellow Bitstrippers really stretch our imaginations to create the shapes, objects and props we want with totally unrelated objects. Flower petals here are made with golf tees and lemons, and I've been known to make a space shuttle out of hockey sticks, wine bottles and easter eggs.





We've gotten a few new toys recently from the Bitstrip development team, including a spotlight that makes for interesting shading and shadowing possibilities.

In my case, it made more realistic space scenes possible, such as the ones below.

Proceeds go to Bitstrips.com to help support this free comic-creation service.

Create a comic or character, then transfer it to a t-shirt with the easy t-shirt creator by Spreadshirt.com.

You can also order t-shirts (and soon other products) from comic strips that the authors have made available to everyone.

The main Bitstrips shop is now open! Here you can buy premade t-shirts from Bitstrips, Pauly Hart, and Boommike's Local Patrol.

Are you looking for mugs, mousepads or playing cards made from your own Bitstrips' designs? Details are available here.

Pauly Hart's T-Shirts by Pauly Hart featuring the Paulywallys.

Paul Jr.'s been making t-shirt designs for months - long before a store was even announced. Though they started out as just cartoons, you can now have classic lines such as, "Got Nuts?" on a tee.

Some of my Totem designs are available as t-shirts.

I have a series of Muggables (designs optimized to put on a coffee mug) from the Nutcracker, Totem, and several other series, with more to come!

Geokis32 has all her designs open for merchandising. Check out her Artsy series for t-shirt inspiration.

Thomasilly has several designs available, including "Glitch".

Wireless has offered some of his pirate strips for t-shirt designs, including "Same ship, different day."

You bet!

Bitstripping is every bit as addictive as coffee, cigarettes, drugs, sex, or gambling. At first, you think you can handle it. Before long, you realize that you haven't moved away from your computer in 9 hours, you're sitting around waiting for updates to the site, or need Bitstrips Anonymous, or that your family and friends will soon be performing an intervention.

Sometime in May, the Bitstrips developers let us know that they were working on version 1.2, and that it would be ready "any day."

We tried to be patient. Really.

Well, mostly we tried to be patient. Sometimes we whined.

But when the developers started teasing us with a new series of editorials, and had our buddy Buddy getting whisked off on a purple couch by Tom Cruise & Oprah, things started to get ugly.



We're happy to report however, that Version 1.2 has (finally) been installed.





It's slick and sleek, with improved navigation, a new Read/Unread feature so you can catch up on strips you've missed, some new props that we've sorely needed, like rocks, fire, liquid, and explosions... and Daleks??



There are now some very happy Bitstrippers out there playing with all of our new toys.

Thanks, BA, DK1, Dorian and everyone else involved!

New Discovery! Blog post by the folks at Creative Creature, a small web development company that helped improve and polish Bitstrips' look, and bring it out of Beta.