Digital Hubby: The Making of a Superhero
(Continued)

More Ways to Take Make-Believe to a Whole New Level

Home-Grown Comic Books:

By far the greatest strength of iPhoto is its ability to let you share your photos in a variety of interesting ways. A group of still photos can be organized into a book, published as a .mac Homepage, or shown as a slideshow. With a little imagination, these features can be used to create your own digital comic book which will delight your children again and again.

Motivated by a Homepage contest sponsored by Apple last year, I had my children don their costumes and stage a few scenes from a simple story I had concocted featuring Spider-Man, my younger son's favorite superhero. Having imported the photos into iPhoto, I then exported each photo to an AppleWorks Paint or Draw document (simply drag a picture from iPhoto into an open AppleWorks document to accomplish this), where I added graphic elements like webs and thought bubbles. I then imported my edited photos back into iPhoto, where I organized them into an album which would form the basis of my Homepage.

If you've never created a Homepage using iPhoto, it's a process which is beautiful in its simplicity. Simply select a photo album in iPhoto, click the Share button, and then click the Homepage icon. iPhoto will connect to the Internet and create a Homepage photo album using your pictures. You can rearrange your photos by dragging them wherever you like, and can choose from a variety of frames in which to display them. You can also edit the Title and subtitle of the page, as well as the caption of each picture. When you're done, simply choose the .mac web-site you want to publish the page to, and click the Publish button.

Although presumably this will change with the upcoming release of iPhoto 2, Homepage offers some options which iPhoto does not currently support, such as the ability to include a counter and feedback button, and the ability to choose whether you want your pictures to be displayed in two or three columns. To access these features, you'll need to log on to Homepage directly and make your changes there--although, as I said, this may change in another week. For my comic book Homepage, I chose to display the pictures without frames (so it would look more like a comic book) and in two columns (so that the pictures would be larger and more legible). To see the finished result, click here.

The beauty of Apple's iApps is that once you've created something like this, you can share it in other ways as well. Using iPhoto's Book feature, I laid out the comic into a simple book (I found the Classic style looked most like a comic book), which I then printed and had coil-bound at Kinko's. The kids love showing it to their friends, and have asked me to read it to them time and time again. Of course, I could have ordered a professionally-bound book from Apple, but I found that the four or five bucks I spent at Kinko's (plus whatever it cost me in ink and paper to print it) was much easier to justify than the thirty bucks Apple charges.

When my wife and I recently decided to give our boys a Spider-Man decorated bedroom for Christmas, my little comic book project came in handy yet again. I printed the pictures at various sizes to fit into the panels of two simple black frames, and voila! the boys have their own wall-mounted comic book starring themselves.

I keep toying with the idea of blowing one of the pictures up to poster size and framing it, but again, the thirty dollars Apple would charge to do it is hard to justify (not to mention that I'm unsure how good the pictures from my little 2-megapixel camera would look at that size). Still, it's nice to know that I have that option, and that it can be done with ease from within iPhoto.