Normally, what I do is draw on an 8 1/2 sheet of typing paper or scrap paper. I have tons of the stuff from my Kinko's days, when a corporate customer gave us several reams of paper a competitor had printed with the wrong logo on it (you can just BARELY make out the logo in the picture to the left). Using a really sharp #2 pencil, I try to draw what I see straight onto paper, but occasionally you'll see me use the "Ball and cylinder" method of drawing.

After that, I scan the image as a greyscale image at 300 DPI. A regular sheet of paper will scan in at about 3500x2500 pixels. Once all the penciling is done for an episode, I'll ink it using a threshold filter in Paint Shop Pro.  The "X"s you see mean two things. If it's an X without an arrow, it usually means "This area will be black." If it's an X with an arrow, it usually means "delete a piece of detail here."

Once it's scanned in, I'll clean up any stray pencil marks that made it through the threshold filter, to get a nice pure B&W image.

The "SFX" portion of the scan is where I do any editing I need to do such as moving an eye, shaving a line down, recompositing a face. In this case, I tilted Michael's head up, so he looks like he's staring at the area that a map would be. Thank goodness for digital imaging. The main reason stories like Closetspace never made it to print in the 90s and why Polychronicon wasn't on your comic book shelves in the late 80's was my horrible habit of finding things wrong many hours after I drew them. Now, after I clean things up, and begin noticing a mismatched eye, or a badly drawn mouth, it gets moved, redrawn or pulled in from another comic.

Another thing done at this stage is effects. Any places that need to be black are colored in, filters and effects are done (there is a Gaussian blur applied to background door to make it look brighter than it already is). I'll also layer stuff in like the map you see here, or more intricate backgrounds (The gazebo for Closetspace #13 is one example).

After it's all composited, I'll draw in the color/grayscale using Wacom Graphire 2 tablet, lovingly donated by a fan,

Finally, the 3500x2500 image gets cut down to a 2500x2500 square for inserting into the comic template.

This poor template, it's been so twisted and turned and morphed.  Originally, it was created in Pagemaker, then converted to Quark Xpress, and now one half of it still exists as an inDesign template.

I assemble the comic in inDesign, pasting in the individual images, and creating text boxes. Once it's all done, it gets saved at a massively huge size (which you can see here), then sized down to 750x525 and posted up for you all to throw tomatoes at. :)