Alright-y then! For me, it goes something like this:
1. Draw a thing in a sketchbook. It was only supposed to be a random thing but whoops, look at that, when you looked away it somehow gained a backstory and a plot and a name and a strange sort of sentience and now it refuses to leave you alone. BETTER DO SOMETHING! ... Let's put it in the pile with all the other ideas you already have.
1.2 ALTERNATIVE STEP ONE: Read a thing, or see a thing, or randomly stumble into a Wikipedia-article of a thing, or hear a thing, or stare at the sky or something and whoopsy-daisy, there we go, another idea for a thing you want to draw a comic about.
2. Carry the idea around for a while, doodling things in sketchbooks and doing cursory research and writing down connected ideas like some kind of absentminded David Attenborough observing the lives of ideas in the wild. Attempt absolutely NO kind of coherent organisation at this stage - ideas are skittish, you might scare them off.
3.Commit to turning it from an idea into an actual thing. Arm yourself with a notebook, a sketchbook, a bunch of pencils, maybe a reference book or two (if you've got them - you can do fine without them too), some snacks, a floofy cat to pet when you need to, and ALL THE TEA IN ALL THE LANDS. Then get to work outlining this big, unwieldy nebulous cloud your baby idea has grown into.
Fail spectacularly at least three times, but keep going.
4.Achieve a finished outline! And by "finished", I mean you now have a document full of VERY GENERAL plot notes (along the lines of "main character travels through forest, sees a weird thing, ends up finding the other main character yay"), interspersed here and there with notes to yourself such as "NAME THIS GUY AT SOME POINT!", "INSERT COOL MONOLOGUE HERE" and "wait where was I going with this again?".
(optional step; gather your outline, your plot-notes, and your potential solutions to upcoming plot-problems in at LEAST three different documents named three different things and scattered across your computer, your notebook and an old sketchbook you can't remember where you put, for optional difficulty!)
5. Decide this is good enough, get cracking on part one of your amazing epic! This means breaking off an acceptable chunk of your outline and hammering on it until you manage to break it down into a more detailed list of "stuff happening in part one". Then you open a fresh page in your sketchbook, take a fortifying sip of tea, and start storyboarding the page-layouts.
(better buckle up - this one is going to take a while)
6.Storyboards are finished, congrats! You now have a couple of sheets of paper covered in two-inch-tall scribbly rectangles filled in with mysterious wobbly lines and teeny-tiny stick-figures, with a handy little description of what each rectangle is supposed to be, along with first-draft dialogue in terrible, barely legible handwriting! Now, better move on to step 7 before you forget what all of these weird scribbles are supposed to be!
7.Draw all the things! Do a digital rough draft of the entire chapter, then sketch the whole thing, realise you want to change something about the costume design of a character, fiddle and tweak endlessly - then ink all the things, colour all the things, poke at all the dialogue a thousand times and wonder who on EARTH thought this pretentious anime-as-heck melodrama was a good idea. Then resign yourself to the fact that this weird thing is now your baby, and you have to take responsibility for it.
8.Wait 6 months to show people the thing you just drew, because hahahaha whoops, you're 50+ pages ahead of your readers, and they're looking at pages you drew half a year ago which now look terrible to you, because you've since learned how to draw your main character properly.
9.Go back to step 4 or 5, and repeat as necessary.
