Show HN: GUI for making animated webcomics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GUI for making animated webcomics

elonman.com

149 pointsjimhi28 comments

I’ve loved webcomics since the early days. There’s huge amounts of truly amazing work. You can find incredible horror stories like The Sword Interval or Stand Still Stay Silent (two of my absolute favorites). There’s long-running diaries like Real Life Comics or serials like PVP. Practically everyone knows Penny Arcade, but have you heard of Three Panel Soul? The rabbit hole runs deep.

However, the tech behind it has lacked. Hosting has been a pain, and aggregators like Webtoon have their drawbacks (and advantages too). Creation is getting easier, but lots of barriers remain.

I’m glad to see some new tools come around. The market for something like this is surprisingly large and highly underserved.

My favorites are the interactive ones like https://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail?titleId=350217&no=31. They had very minimal movement though and it doesn't seem to work anymore.

Lucid TV was my favorite until they nuked the site.

Wow, SSSS is so amazing.

It does feel like there is a great opportunity to increase the dynamism of that webcomic, a space between a full fledged video and something where the text and images can do a bit of a actually dancing (some kind of animation or transition). And, this web comic requires a lot of scrolling and mousing, which I feel like could be improved. But, the overall work is so great I'm sure that occupied the author's attention more than little details like what else they could add. The story is so good and the rest is just minutiae.

I’m glad you like SSSS! I’ve always loved it and was sad when it ended. Absolutely amazing art and story.

I just follow 2 (two) webcomics these days: Order Of The Stick (I guess everyone knows that one?) and Unsounded, which is pretty obscure I guess, but the author is incredibly dedicated to her project and the worldbuilding and charactes are really great. I also used to follow Erfworld before it sadly went on a permanent hiatus 3 years ago...

The best webcomic hosting site I'm aware of is ComicFury. Its not very well known, probably because its layout is very early 2000s, but it's loaded with features, and allows custom layouts like Tumblr.

I like the idea of coupling sound to the page/slide. Would be even better if the audio was generated so that the transition was seamless.

To whom it may be of interest:

https://impress.js.org (visually similar to this project, with 3D)

http://2011.beercamp.com (depth? scrolling)

http://lissajousjs.com/ (A tool for programmatic audio performance in the browser using Javascript, demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBRqOp5ws58 )

edit: just thought they might spark ideas

Can't believe I have never seen Impress JS. I basically reverse engineered this jquery plugin to make this site: http://jaukia.github.io/zoomooz/ and now I feel like impress would have been the better choice. It seems to work almost the same too.

Lissajousjs is wild. I was actually working on a GUI for making endless music next but in a completely different direction than this.

Your links suggest some better ways around syncing sound and timing to browsers than my hacky timers. Will definitely look into this for a revamp. Thanks marci!

> http://2011.beercamp.com (depth? scrolling)

Volume warning when you press the spinning thing, blasted my ears out.

I tried to make a webcomic tool with WebGL (via P5.js) a long time ago. It was fun to prototype.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHqexqBVeSA

https://github.com/xrd/yume.js

Your github repo no longer exists but this looks interesting.

Doh, sorry, it is public now!

Looks a lot like... slideshows

The music didn't sync up well for me (it slowed down and lagged)

There were also a few cases of overlapping images on the text

Brave on Linux at 1920x1080 with a latest-gen CPU and GPU in case that helps. I use arch btw

After some research it seems there’s a web audio api in JavaScript that lets you access a much more precise timer. Should be fixed when I implement that soon.

That's really nicely done!

My first impression was that this could also be useful to replace some video tutorials or thought-explainers I send to people. Looking forward to testing it out.

I was considering that too after showing it to some people. It would definitely require a lot of reconfiguring to have it work on other people websites but not impossible.

There's definitely a lot of clunkiness still but some people have made silly things with some patience.

Interesting concept, but you need to put an obvious mute button on there somewhere so users can kill the audio if they need to.

How does this differ from Prezi?

Can Prezi be used to make webcomics? Looks like it costs money and doesn't sync sounds and actions like this.

Even if it is similar, target audience matters

I ran a webcomic back in the 2000s while I was in college. I have wanted to revisit it with my current material (three young kids) but wanted to give the whole thing a facelift first. This might be my catalyst to do so, thanks!

Would be curious to see what you make - feel free to email me directly (also can fix any annoying bugs you encounter). My email is in my profile.

Neat!

Using Safari, the music pauses each time it transitions to another panel.

The timers are wonky depending on the device and browser

looks like [impress.js](https://impress.js.org/) with music added.

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