You’ll almost certainly have seen Bitstrips cartoons in your Facebook news feed, so why not join the latest craze?
What better way to spend a morning hanging around a deserted train station in the aftermath of St. Jude than to create hilarious comics starring yourself and your Facebook friends. This is the service o ffered by free Android and iOS app Bitstrips, and by now you’ll almost certainly have witnessed its popularity through the cartoon adventures plastered all over your Facebook news feed.
Bitstrips is a huge download, but it includes a good number of high-quality cartoons, and you can go into some detail when designing your avatar. You must log in via Facebook, although alternative logins are said to be coming soon. You then create your avatar in great detail, including gender, outfit, hairstyle, build, eye colour and much more. If you like being the centre of attention, you can feature alone in your cartoons, but Bitstrips really is more fun when you involve your friends. If they already have Bitstrips avatars then you can include them in comic strips without their permission; if they don’t, you can create an avatar for them.
The app’s home page then delivers a scrolling list of the latest comics, and you can add new characters at the top of the page. Tap the Create icon at the bottom of the screen to create your own greeting card, status- or friend comic, within which you can choose from categories such as Birthdays and Anniversaries or Pranks and Insults.
Once you’ve selected a particular cartoon, you can edit the character’s facial expressions and add your own speech bubbles, then click to share it online. Also worth a look is the Archives tab, which displays any comics your friends have created, plus your own cartoons on a separate tab. It’s here that you’ll realise just how popular Bitstrips is – and that’s something of a problem. Bitstrips’ servers are struggling to cope with the app’s immense popularity, and the ‘Comic servers are overloaded, please try again soon message’ makes all too frequent an appearance.
Verdict
Bitstrips is more than likely another Facebook fad,
but this comic-creating app is loads of fun and it’ll
have your friends in stitches. It’s worth a try.
