Manga Studio 3 EX Professional review

Creating comic books on a Mac is a surprisingly difficult task.

The combination of tools required is formidable: artists need to draw the comics, trace rough sketches, add patterns and tones, add speech bubbles and text within them, place individual compositions within editable frames, assemble the artwork on a page and compile multiple pages into a finished comic.

Manga Studio aims to provide an all-in-one solution for the tech-savvy illustrator, combining a vast toolset within a single application. Natural-media tools include pens, pencils, markers, air brushes, pattern brushes and stamps, all optimised for black-and-white comic creation. These tools have the fluidity of expression found in programs such as Painter, with pressure-sensitivity support for tablets to enable thin- or thick-line drawing.

The application produces greyscale artwork, with a built-in resolution independence that allows it to be exported at the size required for printing. You need to add colour by hand after the comic is printed.

Manga Studio provides a range of tools to make the drawing process easier, including perspective and focus line rulers, and a variety of methods for dividing the page into editable panels. The ability to mix vector and bitmap artwork is augmented by the importing of 3D objects, designed for use as templates to be drawn over. These objects can be rotated in 3D space at any time, not just on import.

The program comes with a library of more than 3000 tones, including dot arrays, mezzotints, patterns and photographic backgrounds. Each fill and pattern is automatically added as a new layer. Throughout the application, there's a degree of customisation that allows every facet of every tool, pattern and ruler to be tweaked to an infinitesimal degree.

With so much apparently going for it, it's sad to report that Manga Studio is almost impossible to use. It's awash with unintuitive painting tools, clumsy multi-pane dialogs, bizarre and unwieldy selection tools, uninformative warning dialogs, and a layout that's cluttered and incomprehensible.

The vast pattern library automatically tiles each pattern, but they appear as hard-edged, rectangular blocks that show an all-too-obvious repeat. Making these backgrounds fit the scene involves a complex dialog box, with such tricky controls as vertical sliders for rotation and inexplicably greyed-out options.

Furthermore, the Magic Wand tool results in a visible stepped gap around selections. Even such regular tasks as placing text balloons and fitting captions within them is a tricky, painful business.

In the right hands, Manga Studio is clearly capable of outstanding results. However, the combination of artistic merit and technical expertise required is an unlikely one to find in a single person - even if that person is a Japanese teenager. Overall, then, Manga Studio isn't so much inscrutable as impenetrable.