The 6-Step Guide to Creating and Publishing Your Own Comic Book

Creating your own comic strip, comic book, or graphic novel is an exciting, challenging process that requires a few simple steps. To convey your story and artistic vision, you must follow a roadmap that guides you through each element of comic creation, including choosing a story and characters, illustrating your text, and publishing your work.

Follow our 6-step guide to creating and publishing your own comic book to help you bring your project to fruition and achieve personal and professional success.

Choose a Comic Book Idea

If you’re thinking about creating your own comic book, you need to come up with a unique idea. Popular ideas include superhero adventures, re-tellings of fairy tales or classic stories, coming-of-age tales, and telling a well-known story from another character’s perspective.

Developing your comic book idea can be one of the most challenging aspects of comic book creation. If you are struggling to come up with an original idea, consider using a random idea generator or a writing app. Online programs like Plot Generator and Reedsy are excellent resources, allowing you to generate plots based on genre, character, and even whether you want a sad, happy, or twist ending.

You also need to create compelling characters. Every comic book has at least two main characters: the protagonist and the antagonist. The protagonist is the “good guy” who drives the story forward, while the antagonist is the “bad guy” who stands in the way of the protagonist’s goals and creates conflict to make the story exciting. To create engaging, relatable characters, it’s essential to give them both strong motivations and distinct personalities.

Write the Story

Before you begin creating your comic book, it is crucial to take some time to develop your story. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Start by brainstorming a list of ideas. Write down anything that comes to mind, no matter how silly or far-fetched it may seem.
• Once you have a list of ideas, start developing them into potential plotlines.
• After creating a few potential plotlines, start fleshing out the details.

Once you have developed a detailed outline for your story, you must write a script and create a storyboard. A script and storyboard can help ensure that your story is sequential and has continuity. It also lets you visualize how the images and dialogue propel the narrative.

Plan the Layout

Planning the comic book layout is critical to ensure each panel, background, and dialogue bubble contributes meaningfully to the story. Use your storyboard and script to design each page.

The basic element of a comic book page is the panel. A panel can stretch an entire page or be broken down into several smaller panels of various sizes. Surrounding the panels are the gutters. These empty spaces between panels can be large or small and are often used to direct the reader to the subsequent panel, enhancing the page flow.

Speech bubbles, boxes, and balloons contain the characters’ speech or thoughts. These elements are critical for character development.

Draw a rough draft of each page layout, including the location and size of each panel. Fill in each panel with a sketch of your characters in action.

Draw the Comic

Comics are visual mediums, so drawing your story is essential in the creation process. If you have artistic skills, you can illustrate your text using your preferred medium or a drawing app like Adobe Illustrator or Procreate. You can also hire an artist through a freelance site like Fivver or Upwork to illustrate your comic.

For digital comics, consider user-friendly platforms with applications like StoryboardThat or Pixton. These apps have pre-formatted digital templates with characters, dialogue bubbles, and text that you can drag and drop to create your comic strip.

Print Your Comic Book

If you want to create a physical, printed comic or graphic novel, work with a professional printer with comic printing experience. Comix Well Spring has over a decade of experience in the comic book printing industry. We take your artwork and turn it into a high-quality, professional product you can share with your fans.

Choose our saddle stitch binding for smaller comic projects with fewer than 64 pages or square bound binding for longer works like graphic novels or manga. We also offer various packaging and shipping options to get your books into the hands of your readers, wherever they may be.

To print your comic project, follow our user-friendly ordering procedure, or contact our knowledgeable staff through the online chat feature.

Sell Your Comic Book

After completing your comic book creation journey, getting your project to your fans is the priority. With Comix Well Spring, you can sell your comic book through our online storefront. With our digital platform, you can sell digital and physical copies of your comic and let us fulfill and ship the orders. You can also track sales, create coupons, and collect reviews to post on your social media to drive more traffic to your page.

Create and Publish Your Comic With Comix Well Spring

Comix Well Spring provides professional comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel printing to independent comic book creators. Our printing services offer a fast turnaround of about two weeks, with rush delivery available. We also provide multiple resources for comic creators through free templates, easy-to-use ordering pages, and informational blogs.