Comic strip ideas for beginners: 12 premises you can start today

The hardest panel of a first comic is the one before it: the blank page where the idea should be. Here are twelve premises that would each make a comic worth coming back to, grouped by genre, and the small test they all pass. Take one as it is, bend it, or use the test on an idea of your own.

The three-part test

A premise that will carry a series, not just a strip, has three things:

1. A small place. A bakery, a night bus, a lighthouse, a laundromat. Somewhere the story can return to every issue, so the reader learns it.
2. A want. Someone who needs something and does not have it yet.
3. A thing that comes back. A customer a week, a case a week, a rival, a running joke. The reason issue 2 exists.

Every premise below has all three. Notice how short they are: a sentence or two is plenty, because the first issue finds the rest.

Cosy and slice of life

• Two teenage witches run a seaside bakery where every cake grants one small wish, and the regulars keep asking for the wrong ones.
• The last laundromat on the block stays open all night, and everyone who comes in has a story they've never told.

Mystery

• A small-town mail carrier notices one house has received a letter every day for forty years — and nobody has ever lived there.
• The allotment's prize marrow vanishes the night before the show, and every gardener on the plot has fresh soil on their boots.

Fantasy and fairy tales

• A wolf who has sworn off grandmothers opens a tailor's shop at the edge of the forest, and the woodcutter is not convinced.
• A minor god of lost socks is promoted to god of lost things, and his first job is a city that vanished in a flood.

Comedy

• Two rival food-truck cooks park on the same corner every Friday, and every week one of them invents a dish purely to ruin the other's night.
• The staff of a failing wax museum stand in for the exhibits to save on wages, and a critic is on his way.

Science fiction and space westerns

• A courier delivers memories in glass vials across a neon city, and tonight's package is one of her own.
• The only law on a dust-moon mining town is a sheriff with a robot horse and a deputy who is wanted on three planets.

Found family and coming of age

• A retired boxer catches three kids breaking into his gym to sleep, and lets them stay as long as they train at dawn.
• A sixteen-year-old runs her grandmother's market stall for one season and learns what the regulars really came for.

Beginner mistakes worth skipping

• Starting with the world instead of the person. A kingdom with a map is not a story; a tax collector who cannot read the map is.
• A first issue that explains. Start on a Tuesday when something is already going wrong. The backstory can wait for issue 3.
• Too many regulars. Three is a cast. Eight is a crowd the reader cannot learn.
• Borrowing someone else's characters. A comic about a famous hero you did not invent is a comic you cannot share. Make your own, in the same genre.

Where to take it

Every premise above is on the ideas pages, each with a button that drops it into the new-comic flow as your own — and there are 159 of them across thirty-one genres. Pick a look, and the first issue is written and drawn from it, with the same cast in every panel.

Start with one of these — 35 credits when you sign up, no card. Drawn and narrated by Panel & Ink; the story is yours.