Comics are a great way to tell stories. They allow you to define characters quickly, sketch out situations at speed, drive your story along without any pesky budget constraints and generally have a good time. Unfortunately, they also require that you can draw, which is why most amateur comics end up in the attic with school reports and old valentines' cards, rather than on the shelves of your friendly neighbourhood retailer.

Comic Life sidesteps the whole 'lack of artistic talent' problem by allowing you to use photos instead of drawings, which you can drag and drop into various predefined templates. Add captions, speech bubbles and headlines, and then apply effects to the photos (or the entire page) and it's possible to create a convincing comic strip in no time.

The Deluxe version ships with 15 page templates (each with multiple variations) to get you started or you can create your own from scratch by dragging an empty panel into the workspace and then re-sizing and positioning it wherever you like.

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The terminally lazy can also use Quick Comic feature which will take all the photos in a specific folder and 'pour' them into a ready-made strip; all you do is add the captions and speech bubbles. Comic Life takes care of all the picture cropping for you, but also lets you edit photos manually, rotating and re-sizing them to fit. Most of the time you can simply re-position a picture with the mouse and let the program remove the bits you don't want (the originals stay safe, of course).

Photos can be styled using any of the 21 filters (for example Colored Pencils, Pop Art, Acrylic Comic, Negative, Graphite Sky) and you can then tweak these using the Details panel to alter brightness, saturation, contrast, exposure and sharpness. Filters can also be inverted from here, frames and shadows added and so on.

There are 15 speech bubble, caption and headline types, each with dozens of colour, font and style variations, and headlines in particular can be bent and twisted into almost any shape. The results are uniformly excellent and can be exported as a single image (in various popular formats) an HTML file, Quicktime movie or - on Macs only - PDF.

A glance through some of the examples on the Comic Life web site demonstrates that it can be used to create all kinds of visuals including family trees and posters, party invitations, signs for yard sales, photo collages and scrapbooks, in fact anything where you need strong visuals and clear messages.

There's a version for the Mac and Windows and while both support webcams/iSight for adding an instant photo to a comic strip, only the Mac version has a spell checker and PDF support, courtesy of OS X. The Deluxe version (reviewed here) adds 33 more fonts, 102 styles and 244 templates to the standard, making it well worth the $5 difference.

Much more than just a way to create comics, Comic Life Deluxe lets you produce compelling visuals that combine text and photography in unusual ways. Like all good creative software, the more you use it, the more uses you'll find for it, and the fact that it doesn't require any artistic skill - and is incredibly easy to use - means that everyone can join in.