Apparatus

You're all ready to begin making your comic, now? Well, what are you making it with? In this tutorial, I'll explain how to work with Adobe Photoshop (CS2, to be exact,) but don't think that you're going to be stuck with that lame old MSPaint. Whether you want to pay ridiculous amounts of money for Photoshop, or whether you pirate the damn thing, you need to get your hands on it. There's probably some legal issues preventing me from even talking about torrents and still being hosted by Psy, so I haven't told you anything about pirating programs. Pay the money, folks! Adobe need it to maintain the program we love, so do not go over to The Pirate Bay and have a quick browse or search or anything.
Hooray! You have Photoshop! And nobody had to be shut down! Now you're going to need to get your hands on sprites and backgrounds. Obvious suggestions are places like The Spriter's Resource, The Shyguy Kingdom, and BG HQ, so go to those sites and find what you can use. I save all of the sheets/backgrounds I may need to my computer, but some people don't. If I have what I need on my PC, I can load it up whenever I need it and I'll be good to go. Also, transparent .png files do not work well if you just hit "copy", so you get the real deal when you save your sheets.
When it comes to backgrounds, the best thing you can do is keep them in the same style as your sprites. If that isn't possible, at least try to keep a similar tone to your sheets, so that a bright green RPG-Luigi doesn't walk downwards on a side-scrolling Mega Man X background.
This where the tutorial really starts: Open up your sprites and background(s) in Photoshop. You may want to move them around, and/or adjust the size of the windows so you can see the gray nothingness where your comic will be in a better stead. We're about to make our comic.