How to Make Comics: Ideas, Activities, and Resources for Learning and Making

Over the course of three articles, writer and comics scholar Chris Gavaler helped us understand what comics are, the potential of the art form, and some of the many approaches to making comics. Still, for many of us, starting with a blank sheet of paper can be daunting—even when we know the basic ideas for filling in the page.

To conclude the How to Make Comics series, we wanted to offer a step-by-step approach you can follow in order to transform that blank sheet into a visual story that’s all your own.

This sequence of activities is based on a series of lessons Larissa led several years ago with a group of high school English language learners, in which the students used the comics form to tell the story of their first day in New York. There are many ways to approach making comics, as Chris outlined in the third article in this series, but for our purposes, we are using the story-first approach, since it can easily tie into an English language arts, history, or English as a new language curriculum.

We’ll continue using examples from MoMA’s collection to spark and demonstrate ideas because, as Chris discussed earlier, many works in MoMA’s collection are in the comics form—that is, they tell stories by pairing images.

As you go through this article and begin making your own works, remember that rules and conventions can be broken. The most important thing is experimenting and telling stories in a way that works for you!

Begin by sequencing your story. What happened first, second, and so on? How many scenes are in your story? What do you see as the beginning, middle, and end of your narrative? Breaking a story down into its most essential parts will help you determine how many panels you might need in your comic. For first-time comics makers, we recommend three to six panels (this number will still allow for a rich story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, that’s not too overwhelming).

Once you know the basic parts of your story and the amount of panels you’ll use, start mapping your comic’s structure while considering what parts of your story feel most exciting, impactful, or emotional. How can you bring a reader’s attention to these parts in your story through your comic’s layout? Think about the shapes, sizes, and framing of each panel. Does every panel look the same, or is one more prominent than another? How do they work together?

For example, larger panels, like the fourth and fifth panels in this excerpt from a comic strip by Lyonel Feininger, help convey the excitement felt by the characters when they catch a big fish. At the same time, the long shape of the last panel at the bottom helps create movement. What if you created a panel with an unusual shape, like a star or cloud? How might that shape convey mood and emotion? Learn more about layout in this article from the series.

If you are short on time or feel like you or your students might want some extra support, you can use these pre-made templates.

Once you have the outline for your story, you can start identifying the main characters and what they will look like. Try asking students to describe one or more defining features that are unique to their chosen character. This can be an outfit, a hairstyle, facial features, or even a recurrent motif. Your character can be as detailed or simple as you like, everything from a well-rendered avatar that resembles a real person to a stick figure in a blue skirt. The key here is to make sure that the character is rendered consistently throughout the comic; that way they will be recognizable, allowing the reader to easily follow the story.

In Frida Kahlo’s many self-portraits, she represents herself in different haircuts, outfits, and settings. But she’s always easy to recognize through her well-defined facial features, like her eyebrows.

Once you’ve identified your character and how you will represent them, look at your story and consider what emotions they might experience. How can you convey these emotions through gesture or expression? Practice drawing different emotions by adjusting the shape and position of your character’s mouth, eyes, and eyebrows. For example, if your character is excited, try drawing them with a big smile and arched eyebrows.

If your story has a lot of movement, you can also consider gestures for your character that will fit the story—running, walking, sitting, crouching, etc. Maybe your character can convey excitement by jumping up and down with outstretched arms. Practice drawing these movements, gestures, and expressions until you feel they support the events in your story.

Now that you have a story, fleshed-out characters, and setting, you can decide what parts of the story need to be conveyed through text. You might find that your comic doesn’t require any text, and if so, that’s great! Speech or thought bubbles can help clarify and expand the meanings you already established through images. They can also help you skip details that are important to the story, but might not make for interesting pictures.

When adding thought and speech bubbles (as well as narration boxes that offer information from the perspective of someone outside of the story), experiment with the shapes, size, color, and outlines of these containers. What if a character’s speech is contained within a square box, but their thoughts are placed inside triangles? What if speech and thought look the same and appear as free-floating words in your panels?

You should also consider the appearance of the actual words. As you draft your text, play around with the typeface’s weight (is it bold or thin?), color, spacing, size, and font. How can these qualities help emphasize your words or convey significance? And how can you use words to represent sound? For example, “KRAKOW” can evoke thunder in a stormy scene.

Consider Claes Oldenburg’s Boom (folio 11) from Stamped Indelibly, in which the word “boom” is printed multiple times with thin lines and muted colors on a plain background. How do Oldenburg’s stylistic choices affect the way you read the text? How could you evoke different feelings with a bolder font and brighter colors? Play around with different effects for your fonts to achieve maximum effect.

Whether you’ve been working in pencil, pen, or digitally, you can finalize your comic by deciding how you want it to be read. Most comics are published as books or zines—small booklets created with basic tools like a printer and a stapler. Today, some comics are only published digitally, and are shared with the world through online articles, blogs, and social media.

For example, Allie Brosh’s memoir about depression, Hyperbole and a Half, first began as a webcomic on a blog. Every few weeks, the artist would upload new pages onto her blog, using comics as a way to cope with mental health struggles. While Brosh never imagined her book would end up in print, four years after she started her blog, her illustrations were compiled into a book.

Decide how you’d like your comic to be read. How many people do you want to share it with? Do you want your readers to hold the comic in their hands or experience it on their phone? Maybe your comic takes the form of a series of postcards sent to one person, or as a carousel post on Instagram. You can create your own printed zines or even submit your work to a publication.

A lot of these decisions have to do with the goals you have for your story and your readers. MoMA’s comics series, Drawn to MoMA, is published digitally so people who might not be able to visit the Museum in person can do so virtually, through the eyes of an illustrator.