Filed under: Design, Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Commercial, Beta
ComicBrush lets you create your own comics, or does it?
by Jason Clarke Oct 8th 2008 at 10:00AM
ComicBrush is a new online tool intended to allow regular people like you and me to create cartoons quickly and easily, even if we don't have any artistic talent. So far, so good, seems like a great premise. I was excited to give it a try. Excited, that is, until I found that I needed to create an account just to kick the tires. Creating an account isn't that big of a deal, I suppose, but these days that's a pretty big commitment for something that is likely to be just a momentary curiosity online. Personally, a tool needs to be pretty compelling before I'm willing to take the time to register and give up personal information, even if it is only my email address, location, time zone and birth date.
But the registration process goes off the rails with the license that you must read and agree to. It turns out that ComicBrush is not free (though it's not made clear on the homepage), but that you must purchase Points that can then be used to acquire Assets on ComicBrush. Assets are essentially graphics that you can use in your comics. Okay, fine, what's the big deal, you ask? Well, in the Terms of Service that you have to agree to, there are not one, but two check boxes to agree to. The first one is the complete contents of the TOS, and the second one pulls out the most important element from the TOS (since ComicBrush knows that most of us don't bother to actually read big long legal documents on signup pages).
Here's the text of the second section, which ComicBrush clearly considers the most important element of their Terms of Service:
Specifically, I have read and I agree that I cannot use any Assets for commercial purposes, that Assets are licensed rather than owned, and that individual Assets cannot be downloaded to my desktop, as set out in section 2 above..So, to make it clear, ComicBrush lets you use your real money to buy Points (that have no monetary value, expire in 12 months, and which will disappear if they shut down, though they promise to give you 60 days to use them up if they do ever plan to shut down), which can then be traded for Assets that you can use in your comics, but not if you ever want to post them online in a commercial way. So even if I wanted to, I can't use any Assets from ComicBrush in an image for this post, since Download Squad is a web publication that earns money. Plus, I can't even download the Assets I paid for to my computer, since I don't actually own them; I just own a license to use them in the very limited way ComicBrush lets me use them. And forget trying to actually make a recurring comic strip and posting it on your own site with ads.
I guess they assume that people will want to pay for the right to use their assets to create comics to... email to their friends? Uh, yeah. Good luck with that business model. I'm glad ComicBrush is currently in beta - there's still time to fix this broken concept.
It took my activation email a few minutes to arrive, and by the time it did I had reconsidered whether I even wanted to bother trying ComicBrush out. The Terms of Service are simply too user-hostile for me to bother with. Why would I waste my time learning to use a tool that places so many restrictions on how I can use the output I create with it? Sorry, ComicBrush. You might have a cool web application here, but unless you make it more welcoming (and useful), I'm not sure who's going to actually want to shell out money to use your service.
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They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rtms said 11:23AM on 10-08-2008
Glad you tried this out, at first it looked like a good deal. But the fact it's so limited makes a bad taste in my mouth.
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Will Simons said 6:30AM on 10-11-2008
Thank you for the feedback. As you note, we're still in BETA so hearing about your experience was interesting. Your point about posting to blogs and such is a good one and we will definitely take note.
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Anthony said 8:44PM on 10-13-2008
There's always stripcreator.com. It's been around for years, and is a similar concept, though a little less polished. It is, on the other hand, free to use and free to utilize the resulting strips.
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