Comics
Panels, balloons, gutters and halftones — comic pages as a first-class thing.
Comics are not a template pack bolted onto a design tool here. The page sizes are the ones printers actually use, panels are real masks, balloons have tails that point, and the halftone is a live effect rather than a filter.
Description
The classic comic page template in the editor: three tiers of panels on a trimmed page. The view moves down the page tier by tier — the establishing shot with a caption and speech balloon, three beats with a thought balloon, then the reveal with an inset, an impact star and a sound effect. A panel is clicked and the inspector shows it, a masked group, then the whole page comes back into view.
- Open a comic template: each tier is a row of panels in the layers panel.
- Click a panel: its art is masked to the panel's shape, so cropping it is just moving the art inside.
Start from a page
New → File → Print, or search the template gallery for "comic". 35 comic layouts ship with PopCraft, and they are a good way to learn the grammar even if you redraw every panel:
- Pages — six-panel, nine-panel grid, action (slanted), cascade, chase, flashback, grid-break, interrogation, talking heads, parallel, silent, splash, widescreen, hourglass, negative space
- Manga — manga page, manga action
- Covers — modern, pulp, frontispiece, pin-up
- Strips — daily strip, four-panel gag, webtoon
- Other — zine, riso, back matter (letters page), spreads and polyptychs
Page sizes
| Preset | Trim |
|---|---|
| Comic page | 6.625 × 10.25 in |
| Comic cover | 6.875 × 10.5 in |
| Comic strip | 13 × 4 in |
| Manga page (B5) | 182 × 257 mm |
| Comic spread | 13.25 × 10.25 in — two pages, with a fold guide |
| Comic cover wrap | 13.75 × 10.5 in — back and front, with a fold guide |
Spreads and wraps know they are two pages on one sheet, so an export can cut them back apart for the printer. See print for bleed and imposition.
Panels
Description
A classic comic page. The moon and skyline art in the first panel is dragged: the panel’s mask crops it live, so the framing is a choice that can be changed any time. Then the speech balloon is dragged to sit over the speaker; it is an ordinary layer above the panels.
A panel is a frame with a mask, so art inside it is clipped to the panel shape — including the slanted and wedge-shaped ones. Drag the art around underneath and the panel crops it; the framing is a live decision, not a destructive crop.
The gutter is the gap between panels, and the keyline is the border drawn around them. Because panels are ordinary frames, you can nest one inside another for an inset.
Balloons and captions
Speech balloons, thought balloons and caption plates are components with a tail you can drag to point at whoever is speaking. Thought balloons get a trail of shrinking bubbles. The text inside is ordinary text — styled with a text style, so the lettering across a whole issue stays consistent.
Sound effects
SFX are text like anything else, which means they take gradient fills, strokes, blend modes and
effects. Flatten one (Alt+Shift+F) to push the letterforms around.
Halftone
The Halftone effect gives you Ben Day dots with control over dot shape, angle, frequency and ink. It is computed on the GPU, so it stays sharp at any zoom and exports to SVG as real vector dots — not a flattened image.
Pair it with the Comic decorations (bursts, speed lines, impact stars) and the comic-flavoured UI themes.
Drawing the art
Everything in Drawing applies. The Inking brushes — Studio Pen, Dip Pen, Crow Quill — are built for this, and a page can mix inked vectors with painted raster panels in one file.