Calligraphic Shortcuts for Comics Creation

The interactive creation of comics on the World Wide Web has become increasingly relevant over the last few years as a way for amateur creators to produce, share and distribute their comics. However, web applications that allow this kind of creation still restrict users interaction by not considering the repetition of previous elements across a comics story. Moreover, they use very simple methods for creating new content, therefore not allowing visually complex and rich comics. In this paper, we present a solution that seeks to converge the creation of web comics with the basic principles of traditional paper comics. To that end, we propose a new approach that combines rich interaction methods and geometric transformations for free hand drawings with a retrieval mechanism based on calligraphic shortcuts, to retrieve previous elements of comics. Experimental evaluation with users demonstrated that our approach is better suited for these problems than existent applications. Our solution allows creating comics online with higher flexibility and efficiency, while achieving visually more complex and rich content.