You could do it with a mouse I guess.
Otherwise, lightbox. Lightbox is your best friend for traditional comics. Oh, but don't buy one from the big corporate art stores. Order one off the internet for $30, or, make your own for $10.
The other thing is that greyscvale is probably your best option unless you have an army of copics. Alternatively, you could use colored pencils, but that' still not as inexpensive as greyscale. The easiest (and best-looking imo) is to get a set of graphite pencils and shade with those, then smooth it out with a colorless blender marker for a nice solid effect. Alternatively, you can get the same marker effect by coloring with colored pencils and going over it with a set of greyscale watercolor markers. (The cheapest is $12, sets of near-complete quality colored pencils are around $30)
You could also do it up in india ink, which is the cheapest method that is decent enough to use. Very easy to work with if you pair it with microns for outlining (no smearzes) A bottle of black india ink is $4, and decent (acrylic) brushes are around $2.50 each. In my opinion, the best greyscale method is the method I stated earlier plus india ink. You get a better range of shades and warmths. But india ink itself is cheap, easy, and very nice looking. Also incredibly easy to do backgrounds with this.
So from what I understand, you want to switch to traditional because your digital isn't as good. But you should still practice digital like your life depends on it. When you do get good enough, and it is easier to use, there's so much more you can do with a comic digitally that you just can't do traditionally. Honestly, I don't even have a tablet, and finishing a drawing is easier on the computer than on paper because I can edit to my heart's content. I can try new things out and ctrl+z if it turns out bad. I can resize and fix anatomy and perfect everything. I don't know what I would do if I was stuck to traditional. But if you want to make comics traditionally, go for it. It's a lot of work, but if you're a traditional artist, I can see how using a tablet can feel limiting.
But seriously, a light box helps A LOT.
Oh, the other thing is text and editing. Scanning sometimes goes crap, and sometimes fonts are better than freehand text. So for this, you use this.
http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
I edit everything with this. It's particularly good for correcting color, contrasts, saturation, size, etc. There are also some neat effects like glow and soften that look pretty sweet. You can also add text, but it's very primitive. When I do things traditionally, I ALWAYS use this program to fix the scan and resize the image. For digital work, this is what I use to add text for now.
Anyway, this is the light box I use and some of the equipment I was talking about:
india ink
Looks like
For landscaping and backgrounds
Greyscale set
Looks like
colorless blender
(I can't find any good examples of using a colorless blender to solidify pencil shades, but if you want to see I have some pics I've done using this method)
good luck dude!
