How does one plot a webcomic?

[Trazoi]

Not related to plotting a webcomic, but what's the best program for making one? Preferably not extremely expensive.

Do you mean the best program for writing for a comic, or creating the webcomic itself?

For writing, you can just use any old text editor or a paper notebook. I'm using a personal wiki for brainstorming ideas, in particular VoodooPad which is Mac only, but there's others out there for other OSes like WikidPad.

Then I'm planning on using an editor suitable for scriptwriting for writing the comics themselves. I've got a copy of Scrivener I'm planning on using, but again that's Mac only. There are other editors out there, and for webcomics just a notepad-like program should be fine.

For the art, there's loads of programs out there. You can just draw and ink on paper, scan it in and call it done. For digital work Adobe's range of products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Fireworks) are the most commonly used and the most powerful, but they're pricey. There's cheaper software out there like Paint Shop Pro. And there's a lot of good free tools too like The GIMP, Inkscape (also see my sig for my tutorial), and Paint.NET, amongst others. If you're really masochistic you could just use MS Paint, although I'd recommend at least trying out Paint.NET first .

Alternatively you can use something like Comic Life which allows you to create comics directly. It seems pretty good for simple photo comics, but I find it's a bit inflexible. But it will make things easier.

Then you'll probably want to head over to BlamBot and check out their range of comic fonts. They've got some really good ones there and it seems the majority of webcomics use one or other of the BlamBot fonts.

Finally, you'll need somewhere to host it. Drunk Duck and Keenspot have free hosting, or alternatively you can buy your own hosting and a web domain fairly cheaply for the price of a computer game or two per year and use something like ComicPress (a comics based theme on top of the blogging software WordPress) to help you.

Hopefully that's enough to answer your question!