Beginner’s Guide to Comics, Manga, & Webtoon Drawing Apps

• Beginner’s Guide to Comics, Manga, & Webtoon Drawing Apps
  We go over 5 drawing apps and their features and differences to help you create comics, manga, and webtoons.
• How to Make a Digital Comic Book: Step-by-step comic book creation
  For those who want to try creating comics for the first time, we introduce how roles are divided and the order in which comics are led to completion in American comics.
• Essential Tools and Techniques for Digital Art in Comics, Manga & Webtoons
  Helpful for anyone who wants to get started with comics, cartoons, and webtoons and wants to try digital art tools. We provide an introduction to useful features and techniques of digital art tools.
• Developing Your Own Style for Comics, Manga & Webtoons
  Get information to help you establish a unique art style and to design characters.
• Effective Storytelling and Design Tips for Comics, Manga, Webtoons
  Learn about page composition and paneling to draw in readers, typography, and cover design to stand out from the crowd

Some drawing apps make use of concept art and character design techniques for use in the creation of comics, manga, and webtoons. Clip Studio Paint is a drawing app that offers not only drawing tools, but also balloon and frame features. Plus it can record your production process with timelapse so you can easily share works on social media.

What to Expect in this Guide

First, let’s go over the features and differences between comics, manga, and webtoons. Understanding the different methods of expression in each category can help broaden your scope of creation.

Understanding Comics, Manga, and Webtoons: A Fundamental Breakdown

Comics, manga, and webtoons are all comprised of pictures and text, but each has slightly different characteristics. Although there are various theories on how to define them, we will introduce their characteristics here as rough categorizations.

(1) Comics

Comics mainly refers to American-style superhero comics and bandes dessinées.

Many of the leading comics originating in North America are also characterized by the fact that the main characters are superheroes. Many works focus on themes of good versus evil and real-life social issues. It is said that these types of comics began with newspaper articles in the 1930s.

Bandes dessinées, on the other hand, originated mainly in France and Belgium. They cover a wide range of genres, including comedy, action, and adventure, and have a long tradition separate from English-language comics. Also, they are often larger in size than Japanese manga and North American comics, and there are also a variety of styles with an artistic flavor, so much so that they are described as a visual art.

Currently both American comics and bandes dessinées are generally sold as full-color comic books. They are left-bound, and the panel layout assumes they will be read from upper left to lower right.

Superhero	This is one of the most popular subgenres of comics. It features characters with superhuman abilities, often wearing capes and masks and using their extraordinary abilities to protect humanity.
Horror	Stories that scare or unsettle the reader. They often include supernatural elements such as ghosts, monsters, and other creatures.
Fantasy/Fiction	Stories set in imaginary worlds. Stories often include magical or supernatural elements. It may include subgenres such as scifi, high fantasy, and urban fantasy.
Comedy	Intended to be funny and often includes jokes, satire, and parody. It may include subgenres such as gag manga, comic strips, and humorous graphic novels.
Nonfiction	Comic stories based on actual events, people, or places. It may include subgenres such as biographical comics, historical comics, and educational comics.

(2) Manga

“Manga” is one of Japan's most iconic cultural properties, well known throughout the world. It is said that the “Choju jinbutsu giga” (Scrolls of Frolicking Animals) created between the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries, is the origin of Japanese manga. There are works in a variety of genres, including shonen (boys) manga, shojo (girls) manga, and battle manga. Here are some examples of these diverse genres.

Shonen (boys) manga	Aimed at young men, and includes action, adventure, sports, and fantasy.
Shojo (girls) manga	Aimed at young women, and is popular for romance, school life, fantasy, drama, and the like.
Seinen (youth) manga	Aimed at adult males, and includes action, suspense, science fiction, and horror.
Josei (women) manga	Aimed at adult women, with the main themes being romance, family, work, human drama, and the like.
Battle manga	Revolves mainly around fighting and battles.
Romance manga	Focused on love and characterized by heartwarming and touching love stories.
Horror manga	Focused on horror and bizarre themes, with an emphasis on scary elements.
Comedy manga	Aims to provide laughter and includes gags and surrealist jokes.
Fantasy manga	Often features adventure stories set in a magical or otherworldly settings.
Sci-fi manga	Depicts scientific and technological advances and future societies, featuring robots, spaceships and the like.
Gourmet manga	Focused on food and cooking and characterized by the delicious dishes and food drawn.
Sports manga	Has various sports as the subject, often depicting hard work and friendship.

Although individual genres are described here, there are also works that contain elements of multiple genres.

Looking back on the history of manga, print media has been the predominant medium, but now there are a growing number of readers who read them digitally. Most manga are drawn in black-and-white and are composed of panels, and they are read from right to left and top to bottom to follow the flow of the Japanese language.

(3) Webtoons

Webtoon is the blanket term for digital comics originating in South Korea. It is a more modern form with a shorter history than comics and manga, having begun in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They are designed to be read on smartphones with vertical scrolling. Like comics, they are characterized as being in full color. They are also produced in a team, with separate people in charge of each process, such as scriptwriting, line drawing, and coloring.

Exploring Related Disciplines: Concept Art, Character Design

Comics, manga and webtoons are composed of multiple elements such as characters and backgrounds. Therefore, creative skills in concept art and character design are important.

Check out our introductory guides to concept art and character design as well!

Introductory Guide to Concept Art

Introductory Guide to Character Art & Design

This section presents five of the best drawing apps for comics, manga, and webtoons. The following are art software already used by many creators and should serve as a reassuring partner in your creative process.

Why Drawing Apps are Essential for Your Artistic Journey

Drawing apps allow you to draw digitally. Compared using analog tools such as pen and paper, it is easier to edit and modify lines, colors, and shapes with apps, and they have the advantage of speeding up your process. There are also apps that support a variety of devices such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones, making it convenient to create from anywhere and at any time.

There are many different types of drawing apps with many advantages. Each app has different features: some have functions useful for comics, manga, and webtoons, while others are specialized for illustrations. This section also introduces features, user interfaces, compatibility, and more. Please use this as a reference to help you choose the best drawing app for you!

Clip Studio Paint

An all-purpose drawing application that can also create illustrations, manga (black-and-white, color), and animations. It can be used to create any category of comics, manga, and webtoons. It also offers a wide range of digital drawing tools to broaden your range of expression.

This app is used by professional manga artists and animation creators with a user interface that is great for professional work. Clip Studio Paint also features a simple mode easy for even for beginners to use, which is great for tablet and smartphone users. These UI settings can also be switched at any time.

Procreate

A popular iPad drawing app. Even though it has a wide range of features, its simple interface makes it easy for even beginners to start drawing. This app features limited features for comics, manga, and webtoons, but it is very useful for illustration creation.

Krita

This drawing app is free*. It is multifunctional, with layer creation and animation functions included. The app is also open source, allowing users to add features and tools to use.

* Fee required if installing from Steam or the Microsoft Store.

MediBang Paint

This free art software has basic features for drawing comics, such as panel frames and tones. The paid version gives additional cloud space and unlimited functionality. Note that brushes and other settings saved on a device cannot be transferred between different operating systems.

Photoshop

This program is used by professionals in design and photo processing. It is very multifunctional and geared towards intermediate users. Although not specialized for illustration or manga production, it excels at cropping photos and color correction as it was originally designed for photo processing.

If you want to know more about each drawing app, we recommend the following article.

Top Drawing Apps and Software in 2023 (Free & Paid)