Scratch For Kids For Dummies

CHAPTER 2

Create Your Own Comics

When I was a kid, my favorite comics were The Uncanny X-Men and The Avengers because each had a large cast of superheroes. I think I spent more time trying to draw Wolverine and the Scarlet Witch and Captain America and Dark Phoenix than I did reading the colorful pages. But my favorite things to draw were ideas for entirely new heroes and villains.

Scratch offers many ways to design your own superheroes and villains, and provides many different backdrops to set your comic stories in a bunch of different locales, from the realistic to the fantastic.

Modify Sprites from the Library

Can I let you in on a secret? Many of the sprites and backgrounds in my Scratch animations and games are not completely original. WHAT?! The author of Scratch For Kids For Dummies cannot even create his own sprites? I could create all my own sprites. I really do enjoy designing my own characters and animals and vehicles and backgrounds. (I even show you how I design some of them throughout this book.) But sometimes, I’m in a rush to create a quick comic strip or produce a new animation or develop a new game.

Fortunately, the Scratch development team has created a huge variety of sprites to work with. They don’t provide any superheroes, but you can modify the graphics any way you choose. Your first task is selecting a person from the built-in Sprite Library and giving ...