Having put together a number of photo comics, I’ve found there’d no way I could have done it without manually making balloons. I need to put together another tutorial, covering the tips and tricks I’ve learned.

Recently, I tried methods to have text inside a balloon that resizes and reshapes to fit the text. That ended in failure every step of the way!

I managed to convert the eps file to pdf with this online utility (http://convert.neevia.com) and import the pdf into inkscape.
I am a complete newb with inkscape, so I fiddled around rather aimlessly, among other things activating the XML view of the doc. Somehow this got me into a mode where the balloons and their nodes/paths were editable. So I think they can be copied individually.

I’ll check out your tip Path–>Break when I have the time :)

At a closer look, the blambot balloons aren’t exactly to my taste, but it certainly is a good thing to build one’s own resource for reusing instead of building every balloon from scratch.

Blambot also has a nice article about “cartoon grammar” (http://www.blambot.com/grammar.shtml)

You can open the PNG in Inkscape, then choose “Path->Trace Bitmap”. This gives will vectorize the balloons, but they’re still one image. Path->Break Apart will break them into individual vectors.

At least, in theory that should work. You might need to save each image from the EPS to a separate file before importing them into Inkscape. After all that work, the speech balloons might just be easier to reproduce from scratch in Inkscape. In fact, I should create a resource of pre-made speech balloons in SVG format…

Cheers,
Scriveyn