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Man Builds Tool for Hacking Comic Strips

It’s a tool that lets you use computer code to build comic strips about the kind of people who use computer code to build comic strips. In other words, it’s a hacker idea of fun — in more ways than one.
Image may contain Plot and Text
A comic created with Cmx.js, an online comics generator and editor from Czech hacker Antonin Hildebrand.

It's a tool that lets you use computer code to build comic strips about the kind of people who use computer code to build comic strips. In other words, it's a hacker idea of fun -- in more ways than one.

The tool is called Cmx.js, and it's the brainchild of Czech developer Antonin Hildebrand. Basically, it lets you use a simple markup language to build comics that look like the Randall Munroe's geek-favorite comic strip XKCD.

Hildebrand tells us he created the thing so he could build his own comic strip about the online currency Bitcoin, but then, in typical hacker fashion, he decided to share it with the rest of the world. The idea is to let developers collaborate on comics in much the same way they collaborate on software via online services such as GitHub.

As it stands, Hildebrand still hasn't done the Bitcoin comic, but he did use Cmx.js to build a comic about creating Cmx.js (see above).

He isn't the first hacker to make an XKCD related image generator. Graphs like the one below are a common trope in XKCD, and a few months ago, Dan Foreman-Mackey decided to write a tool for building these XKCD-style graphs in JavaScript. His work eventually spawned the more user friendly XKCD Graphs.

Image:

Randall Munroe

This also inspired Hildebrand to go further and create a generator for entire XKCD comics using the same JavaScript library, d3.js.

"I wanted to learn d3 and I started hacking on the project during weekends," he says. "Originally, it wasn't meant as a visual editor. I just wanted a simple HTML-like markup and a JavaScript library which would render it into SVG." He added the visual editor to make it more usable.

It's just a proof of concept, and Hildebrand doesn't think it's suitable for non-developers. At this point, he has no plans to turn it into a service, and he doesn't see a way to make the project pay for itself. But you can have a go if you like. The code is available on GitHub.

"I think it has some potential to become 'YouTube for comics' if someone takes it from here and adds tons of features [and a] polish."

Given the success of "macro generators" such as Roflbot, he's probably right.