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).
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