This post, from Luke T. Bergeron, originally appeared on mispeled.net on 6/14/10.

I’ve posted about the comic I’m making a few times before. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with it once I’m done with it, but it’s so much fun making it that I plan to worry about that later. I know I’ll probably have a print version and a digital version available in some form, but right now I’m focused on finishing it.

Making the comic has been a multi-step process I’ve learned through trial and error (by wasting lots of digital PDF ink – luckily it’s free). I don’t know all the ropes – I only know what works for me – but what works for me might work for you, too. So I thought I’d take a few minutes and explain my process:

The Script – Microsoft Word

Tune Comic Script page 20

The first thing I did, before anything else, was write the comic book. In my case, I adapted a script I’d written for a video game, since it was largely visual anyway, but I imagine that starting from scratch would be similar.

I wrote in a Word document, with each page in Word devoted to a page in the comic book. At the top of each page was a line telling me the page number and how many panels the page needed. Here is the actual top line from page 20 of my script:

20 Page – 6 Panels – 4 same sizes, 1 long bottom wide panel, one small shot at the bottom

I did it this way to make it easy to lay out later – because of my layout process, knowing how many panels I had on each page (before diving into the content) was easiest for me – it made the layout faster.

Read the rest of the post from Luke T. Bergeron on mispeled.net.