An Interactive Web-Based System for Creating Single Panel Cartoons with Visually Valid Compositions

Abstract

The creation of cartoon-based stories (comics) requires a lot of creativity and hard work for naive users. We observe that single-panel cartoons are the building blocks of any comic story. To develop a strong comic story, it is critical to obtain visually valid single panels. In this work, we have developed a methodology to guarantee the placement of characters to obtain a valid cartoon frame based on the methods used by professional cartoonists. Using this methodology, we have developed a web-based system to create single-panel cartoons from a given set of character images. We have made this system available in GitHub as open-source so that this basic single-panel cartoon can be used as infrastructure to develop more complex structures. Our web-based system for single-panel cartoons can be viewed at http://storytelling.viz.tamu.edu.