The nifty, US$19.99 software makes it easy for the amateur comic book illustrator to put together a graphic novel. There are more than 500 layout templates to choose from, 50 types of text balloons, action text, regular text, caption boxes and a library of useful clip art.

Comic Book Creator can import jpegs, bitmaps or gifs, ensuring a variety of potential source material - from your scanned illustrations to family photos or pictures from the company picnic.

The program's manual is quite useful, giving advice on how to develop your comic book. It covers storyline, dialogue writing and planning illustrations for the page. The package also includes a sample comic book as a pdf file, and it doubles as a quick start-up guide.

Comic Book Creator is easy to use and works similarly to Microsoft's Publisher, so the learning curve is not steep. Once you have chosen a layout template, images can be dragged and dropped from the library palette into a comic panel.

The image is automatically resized and positioned in the panel, which can then be edited to your liking. The program allows images to be scaled up or down, from 50 per cent to 500 per cent, although enlarging images to 500 per cent makes them highly pixilated.

The image position in the panel is easily adjusted by pressing and holding down the left mouse button, then dragging the image so that it is framed the way you want in the panel.

You can also change the panel's border attributes, from colour to line thickness.

Once you have all the images in place, text balloons, action text and caption boxes are easy to add. In Comic Book Creator, there are two types of text balloons: raster and line-drawn. Raster balloons are images and, when enlarged, they lose image quality. Line-drawn balloons are vector-based. They can be enlarged without loss of quality and their tails are adjustable, which is not the case with raster balloons.

Adding, deleting or moving pages is simplified with buttons in the tool bar. Comic Book Creator can also merge files, allowing two comic files to be combined into one large compendium.

Bundled with Comic Book Creator is PDF Writer and GPL Ghostscript, a postscript generator that enables you to output your comics in PDF format. Also included is Fraps, a utility that allows gamers to capture frames from their favourite PC titles. This enables comics to be based on video games.

Comic Book Creator is suitable for those not familiar with layout programs such as QuarkXpress or InDesign but who want to create pages in a comic-book style. Graphic designers or those familiar with Illustrator, Quark and InDesign might find the program too basic and restrictive.

A major concern for the graphic designer is the absence of a rotate tool - a basic tool of any layout or drawing program.

This is a major oversight. While designing the illustration accompanying this article, I attempted to rotate a sound-effect word slightly but was forced to leave it in a horizontal position.

Another oversight is a lack of proper text editing functions - there are no controls for leading, tracking, kerning or drop caps. There is also no Chinese character support so far, although the publishers have promised support for both Chinese and Japanese in the near future. Manga and manwha artists will have to wait a bit longer.

One redeeming feature is that all layout pages and clip art can be imported into InDesign. This allows Comic Book Creator to be put to better use. After tracing a comic page's panels and importing ready-made text balloons, designers will have all the powerful editing tools of InDesign - plus Chinese text support - at their disposal.