How to Start a Webcomic - Basic Steps and Tools

Webcomics are getting popular for self-publishing manga or comic artists to showcase their talents. That is because self-publishing physical comic books has a high overhead start up cost, which may total up to thousands of dollars, while starting a webcomic can be as little as zero cost to a few hundreds of dollars.

However, few aspiring manga or comic artists know how to start a webcomic from scratch. We are going to discuss some of the needed tools and basic steps required to start a webcomic.

Tools needed to start a webcomic

You will need:
1. An image scanner.

Reason: This is essential if you want to plan to draw your artwork on paper and scan it into your computer to upload into your website.

Alternatively, you could buy a graphics or drawing tablet and start drawing from your computer. However this method is not encouraged as it takes skill and time to adapt to drawing on your graphics or drawing tablet.

2. A graphics or image editing software.

Reason: This is important to do changes and touch up on your artwork images files. When we draw, we are bound to have lines or pencil sketches that are out of place. Having a graphics or image editing software is necessary to make corrections on our artwork.

3. An Internet connection.

Reason: Without an Internet connection, it will be impossible to start with your webcomic in the first place.

4. A hosting site for your blog or website.

Reason: You need to have a website or blog online to feature your webcomics to the Internet community. There are free blog hosting sites like Blogger and Wordpress.

Be sure to include an image gallery for your website or blog. That will house your webcomic images.

How to start a webcomic: Basic steps

The following steps are recommended if you do not have a graphics or drawing tablet, or you are not able to draw on a graphics or drawing tablet well.

1. Draw your manga or comic art on a piece of white paper.

2. Scan the completed artwork into your computer via the image scanner.

3. Start inking and toning your artwork in the computer.

4. Do necessary clean up and corrections onto your artwork with the graphics editing software.

5. Add speech balloons and conversations if you haven't.

6. Resize your image file so that readers do not have trouble reading your webcomic. Save your image file into a web-compliant format. For example, png, gif or jpeg files.

7. Upload your webcomic images into the gallery of your website or blog. Arrange them in sequential order according to your comic script.

These are simple steps and necessary startup tools to start a webcomic online. These basic steps and tools will help aspiring webcomic artists in starting up their webcomic without much cost.