Minions at Work: A Photocomic

Though I’ve been using it mainly to repost classic “Minions at Work” panels, the purpose of this site is to ramp up to a reboot of the comic in a new, multi-panel form. I’d hoped to have that going by now, at least occasionally, if not on a regular basis, but a lot of stuff keeps happening, like parts of our house blowing off in December. And then there are the software problems.

My old favorite, Corel Paintshop Pro, isn’t a good tool for multi-panel comics. I was looking into Manga Studio (now known as “Clip Studio Paint,” a program aimed at Manga artists, and used by some web and indie comic producers. But while it has good panel layout and word balloon functions, its text formatting is pretty terrible, and I quickly grew disenchanted with it.

This week I decided to try a new approach, Adobe InDesign, a program I already had for book layout and cover design. I knew it could do the panel layout, but word balloons were more of a challenge. It took a lot of on-line research, but I found a way to make it work. This cartoon is both practice and a “proof of concept.” The pictures are pretty random, and the dialog is just filler I made up on the fly. I had already posted it on the Minions at Work group on Facebook, but I decided I needed to see what it looked like inserted into our web comic theme. So, here it is. Let me know what you think. (Mainly I’m interested in issues of appearance and readability, not the quality of the comic itself!) Leave me a comment below! Thanks!