Comic Life provides the easy-to-use tools; you provide the creativity.

For many of us, life seems to imitate art, so wouldn't it be cool to meld the two? With Comic Life Deluxe Edition, you can transform your personal photos into colorful comics - and it's fun, easy, and extremely addicting.

You start building your comic by laying out panels to hold photos or simply picking from the 322(!) included templates, which range from traditional grids to more-conceptual constructs, such as heart and fish shapes. Panel attributes (and attributes for all other elements in a comic, for that matter) can be changed to spiff things up - you get to adjust colors, drop shadows, borders, and the overall shape of your comic.

Once you set the framework, it's time to import your photos. Just drag and drop pics from Comic Life's file browser, located at the bottom-right corner of the app's main window - navigate to the appropriate location on your hard drive, or dive into your iPhoto Library with one click of a button. If you have a video camera such as an iSight or DV cam, Comic Life can capture images directly from it. After you place a photo in the appropriate panel, you can move the pic around or zoom. You can even add some visual punch by applying one of 17 image filters. Want an authentic comic look? Choose Comicify. Feel like going psychedelic? Select Pop Art '05. It's fun to experiment, but filters only work in Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).

Our favorite step comes next: adding dialog balloons, captions, and lettering to tie everything together. Comic Life comes with 12 varieties of dialog balloons to drop into your comic pages, including a dotted oval for whispers and a cloud shape for conveying thoughts. Movable balloon tails make it easy to connect balloons to the proper subjects, and you can extend a balloon or attach an additional balloon to a pre-existing one - great when you want to lengthen a conversation within a single panel. Playing around with lettering is fun, too, as you can stretch, warp, and rotate words to your heart's content. Done right, you'll almost hear the "POW!" coming right off the page

When your comic is ready, the only thing left to do is publish it - you can print it out, save it as an image, create a QuickTime movie (just a video slide show of all your comic pages), export it to HTML so you can put it on the Web, or send it straight to your .Mac account. If you plan to publish regularly on .Mac, Comic Life gives you convenient access to sort comics, delete older ones, and rename your home page

The bottom line. Comic Life is a remarkable app, and we love it. You can save $5 and buy the standard edition directly from the developer, Plasq (www.plasq.com), but you get fewer fonts, styles, and templates. Splurge, and get the Deluxe Edition.

COMPANY: Freeverse
CONTACT: 212-929-3549, www.freeverse.com
PRICE: $29.95
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3 or later (Mac OS 10.4 or later for photo filtering)
Easy to use. Fun, fun, fun!
Image filters require Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).