How to makea comic.

Before anything else, settle three things: the format, the length, and who reads it. A four-panel strip and a twenty-page chapter are different crafts, and the choice changes every decision downstream — how much you can say per panel, how many characters you can afford on the page, whether a reader scrolls or turns.

Pick the smallest thing that still tells your story. Most first comics fail because they were planned as a chapter and abandoned at page three. A finished strip teaches you more than an unfinished book.

A comic is a sequence of moments, not a story with pictures added. Write the beats as plain sentences first: what changes in each one. If two beats change the same thing, cut one. If a beat needs three sentences to explain, it is two beats.

Three beats is enough for a strip: a situation, a turn, a consequence. A page usually wants five to eight. Keep them in prose until they read well — moving words is free, and moving drawings is not.

The single biggest difference between a comic that reads and one that does not is whether the same character looks the same twice. Decide the permanent facts — face, hair, build, default clothes — and write them down before any panel is drawn.

Keep temporary facts separate. Wet, injured, carrying something: those belong to one scene, not to the character. Mixing the two is how a coat changes colour halfway through a chapter.

Now convert beats into frames. For each panel decide the shot size, who is in it, and what the reader learns. Vary the shot sizes — three medium shots in a row read as flat, and a close-up costs nothing but earns attention.

Leave room for the words. Bubbles take a third of a panel more often than beginners expect, and a panel composed edge to edge has nowhere to put them. Plan the gutters and the reading order at the same time.

Draw panel by panel rather than page by page. A page drawn as one image cannot be corrected — one bad hand means starting again. A page drawn as separate panels means one bad hand is one small job.

Expect to redraw. Budget two or three attempts on the panels that carry the story and none at all on the establishing shots. Reject with a reason, not just a retry: a stated reason is reusable, a retry is not.

Lettering is where amateur comics show. Put bubbles in reading order, point tails at mouths rather than heads, and never let a bubble cover a face. Read the page aloud — if you stumble over which bubble comes next, the reader will too.

Then export for one destination at a time. Print wants 300 dpi, bleed and a trim margin. Webtoon wants a long image cut where no bubble is crossed. Social wants a safe area. The same pages, three different files.