Remember MangaKit? It landed
Tony's comics app is out. Composer is the real tool, and Reader is the free way to hand your book to somebody.
Back in July I wrote that Tony Leonard, a friend of this studio, was quietly turning his comics workflow into software. It shipped.
MangaKit Composer is the app, and it is $50. It started as his own kit of balloons, screentones and page templates, and he rebuilt the whole thing into a standalone program instead of a pile of files you drag between other people's software. It handles a whole book rather than a page at a time, in monochrome for classic manga production or RGB and CMYK when the job is headed to print.
The part that got me is the 3D bridge. Bring a model in to stage a background, line the camera up, then convert it to lines and tone so it sits inside your drawn world instead of looking pasted in. Anyone who has fought a complicated background knows exactly why that is in there.
MangaKit Reader is the free companion. Composer bakes your project out to a .mkbook file and Reader opens it, so an editor or a friend can read the whole thing without a license. He calls that a digital ashcan, which is a lovely bit of comics vocabulary.
One honest note: this first release is Windows 10 and 11. Mac and Linux are on his roadmap. Most of you are on a Mac, so I would rather say it here than have you find out at the checkout.
Tony is a games-industry veteran from his Tokyo years with comic work in Heavy Metal, and the creator of Cyberfunks and METADEATH. Tools built by a working artist for their own workflow are a specific kind of good, because the person who made them has to live with them every day.
Go look at Composer, and go read METADEATH.