Best iPad Apps

Photos and Movies

Best App for Creating Comic Strips

Strip Designer

$2.99 Version: 1.8.4 | Vivid Apps

Ka-pow! Here’s the knockout winner for anyone looking to crank out their own photo-based comic strips. The app lets you compose everything from single frames tagged with silly speech bubbles to multi-paned layouts ready for complex stories. Start with the pix in your photo library and then adorn and edit using an inventive and highly customizable catalog of tools. The best include special effects filters (Comic, Sketch), editable stickers (Wham! Bif!); and dozens of ready-to-use template designs (three squares in a row with a filmstrip border, six plain rectangles). Fun for the whole family, guaranteed.

COMIC CANVAS: First pick a layout and import one or more pix. Add and adjust speech bubbles and then write your dialogue. Wanna shrink the font size? Just resize the thought bubble, wait a sec, and then the program automatically picks a smaller font. Lots of sharing options: copy to the iPad’s clipboard, email a JPEG or PDF, save to your Photos library, or post to Facebook or Flickr.

FILTER FUN: The Halftone filter lays a Roy Lichtenstein-style pointillist mesh over your pic; Invert adds a photo-negative meets X-ray glow. Add more than one filter at a time and adjust the intensity of each by using the slider below the filter bar. Go crazy experimenting: you can remove any effect by tapping ...