Comix News Network: Webcomics and Student Journalism

Comix News Network is an open source web tool that combines the Drupal content management system with a custom application that allows people to create their own web comics easily and simply as a complement to regular student reporting and a platform for discussions about issues that concern them.

It’s designed to enable and encourage artistic engagement, civic journalism, and social networking.

The idea for this project originated with developments at an after-school journalism program in Kolkata, India.

How might communities use it?
One of the things that building into a content management system will allow us to do is provide a rudimentary student newspaper functionality. During our research, we discovered an unfortunate lack of decent web-based high school newspapers. We aim to create a template for incorporating the comics and blog posts in the Webcomix system into a coherent, easy-to-use mechanism for student reporting/editorial cartooning. Students will be able to use the content management component of the project to have ongoing conversations (using the editorial cartooning component) regarding issues that affect them in their lives and communities.

At what stage of development is it?
Comix News Network is in early development. Once completed, the tool will be open source, allowing for the possibility of other civic media applications for the technology. The tool itself has been built and the content management system will be completed by May 2009.

Some notes on technical aspects:

Comix News Network provides a Dom (Document Object Model) based imagery combiner for
the web. While most 'web comics' solutions are created with opaque
mechanisms (canvas or flash) - webcomix is not. This allows the manipulation
of the comic scene via web standard technologies such as css and javascript.

Some Features:
* Dom Based Creation Tool - Webcomix uses the JQuery UI library to provide a
simple Dom based scene creation tool. Assets can be added and manipulated
within div panels and backgrounds, css and javascript effects can also be
applied.
* Modern CSS Effects - Webcomix makes use of modern CSS3 properties as they
are implemented in modern rendering engines and browsers (webkit, firefox).
For example, webcomix uses the rotation and scaling properties of CSS3 for
asset manipulation.
* Simple Canvas Image Creator - The system also includes a basic pencil
style drawing tool. Images created here are encoded and saved to the server,
allowing users to make quick sketches of assets without resorting to a
complex drawing program.
* Access and analysis - Transparent access to information on assets is
available from the database or through direct manipulation of the Dom. This
allows the compilation of comic statistics and external access to existing
comics at any time in the development of the application.