Panel Party is a small team of indie creatives that came together with a goal to make great tools and games and to support the wider indie artist community!

Comix Cleric is a ready-to-go web framework that’s specially tailored for making webcomic sites. It’s highly-customizable, mobile-friendly, and made BY cartoonists FOR cartoonists!

Existing tools for making sites for webcomics are quite limited. ComicPress might have gotten the job done back in 2015, but with no updates in over a decade (seriously!) it can be buggy, clunky, and overall sorely lacking in features that modern sites need. Replacements like Comic Easel and Toocheke have popped up, but being tied to WordPress means that there’s only so much they can do.

Furthermore, if you want to have your own website custom-made, it’s gonna either cost you an arm and a leg to pay someone to make it for you, or you’re gonna need to make it yourself. And let’s face it: Things are more expensive than ever, and coding is HARD.

Since we knew we could do better for our community, that’s exactly what we set out to do with Comix Cleric! Not only will Comix Cleric have all the tools you’ve come to expect from existing platforms, but it will be flexible enough that you can spin it up anywhere you can host with custom code—all without breaking your budget.

Poor grammar aside, making a better toolset for comic creators isn’t the only reason we’re making this project happen.

Back in the day, comic creators simply… created! Everyone had their own custom sites, linking to others in a nice network via webrings and growing through word of mouth. But over time, technology advanced, and while many good things came from it, artists and creators generally got the short end of the stick.

Tools for making digital artwork have made it easier than ever to create a comic, and social media gives everyone instant access to find new readers. But at the same time, with so many people in the online ecosystem, it’s more difficult than ever to grow a following and stand out from the crowd.

Additionally, comic-specific platforms like Webtoon, Tapas, and GlobalComix have sprung up, giving anyone the ability to put their comic online for free. Unfortunately, these platforms have become more and more corporatized over the years, promoting the same series over and over while offering their contracted artists low wages and poor working conditions for their creations.

Worse still, many are utilizing AI in their marketing and creator tools, sometimes even on creators’ works without their permission! AI in general has been a scourge on the creative community in recent years, being well-known for churning out slop trained on millions of artists’ hard work. And that’s not even touching on the environmental impacts of the technology. Blech!

Needless to say, the comics community has been in dire need for a way to bring “art” back as the focus of the art form. Comix Cleric is NOT a hosting platform—it’s a way for you to make your own custom site that you can do what you’d like with, giving you back control over making your comic as creative and amazing as you know it can be.

Comix Cleric is a piece of software, silly! It doesn’t have feelings. That’s something you should ask your friends and loved ones, who DO have feelings you can ask about!

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