National Geographic Kids Silly Pets Comic Book Creator (**** out of four) offers a fun and easy way to create a comic book (or any kind of photo book) based on pets. The "silly" part comes from all the crazy clip art images you can add to pet photos, but the program actually works for any type of photos—-yours or theirs, fun or serious.

"Kids" of all ages and all levels of computer skills can easily create comic books, photo pages, comic strips and much more by using any of the more than 700 pieces of National Geographic approved art included in the program. The images we viewed are as terrific as you’d expect, but it’s also easy to import images and photos of your own.

To begin your creation, just select a layout from the more than 100 included templates and masks, then drag each photo or image you want to the box where you want it on the page, and start adding whatever else you want: images, decorations, text and such. There are colorful hats, bows, ribbons, tiaras, moustaches and more to size and place on your animal. You can also select from the many animal sounds you can include with your creation. Then you might want to add a caption box or a text balloon where you can insert whatever type of text you want (there’s a wide variety of sizes, types and colors available), change anything you want, and voila! You have a dog who makes witty remarks or cracks jokes—and, of course, still has that major cute factor. When you’ve finished your creation, you can publish it on a home printer, email it to friends and family, post it on a web page, play it as an animated flip book or use it in a blog.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to try many more of the cool features available. The templates allow you to create pages with a wide variety of layouts, ranging from a single photo or image to a page filled multiple boxes in a variety of sizes; the clipart, photos and images can be sized, rotated and cropped, and the undo button makes it especially easy to experiment with many different looks. Don’t like what you did? Just use undo and try something different. The possibilities are endless here and limited only by the amount of time and energy you want to spend.

National Geographic Kids Silly Pets comes with a vast collection of materials to use in your project: there are more than 100 word balloons, 200 caption boxes, 40 Sony animal sound effects and also extensive text and color editing options and an audio record feature for adding your own narration. If you don’t find what you want from all these materials, you can import your own.

You can import graphics from JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and EMF formats, audio from MP3, WAV and SMA files, and animations from GIF images. Output your creation to JPEG, TIFF, BBMP, PNG, EPS, PDF, HTML, ZIP or CBCX (comic book file) files.

One of the best features of this program is its ease of use. We loaded the program and content pack easily and quickly and then started putting together a page just by using the help from the on screen tool tips. We had a finished page in minutes. But the program also includes a witty comic book-style set of instructions that are very helpful for getting started. And, an outstanding feature for exploring the many additional options and features is the included (online) comprehensive 170-page manual, complete with a table of contents. There’s also a useful FAQ that answered many questions about some of the common features.

We know many dog lovers, so we gathered some favorite photos of one friend’s dog for a short comic book. It was fun to use the photos to create a personalized story featuring her dog. We added some of the included captions, some "words of wisdom" from her dog, a crown for the "queen" of the household, and emailed the book as a gift. Dog lovers love this type of gift.

This program is easy and fun for "kids" of any age who love animals and want an easy way to use their creativity to produce a fun item that they will enjoy and likely want to share.

We reviewed a similar program, Comic Book Creator 2, also from Planetwide Media, in June, 2008, and you may want to check out that program at: http://www.norma-tony.com/c050708.htm. This program offers the same drag and drop technology and similar templates, images, import/export options and more and also allows you to use all these features for a comic book or many other types of page layout. The difference in programs is largely in the types and numbers of images included: one focuses on animals, and the other on a variety of other types of images. The images, photos and other options included in each of these programs make either--or both--programs appealing enough to have a copy of each in your collection. We had fun using each.