Panel Manga

Paneling manga or comics is no simple task. But put your mind to work, and you'll be there in no time! Good luck, manga-ka in training!

Steps

Think of what kind of actions your characters will be doing, step by step. In the first stage, plot out four to six boxes on a piece of paper and write your first actions in each box, with the caption under them.
Decide on the angle for each frame. Close-up or background-shot? Horizontal or vertical, maybe slanted? How does this effect the scene?
Rewrite the panels on a different sheet of paper and fit them together [for the American manga artist, panel them left-to-right]. If you are leaning towards traditional format, right-to-left panels are a nice idea. Decide in this part of the process what frames bleed out from the edges, but be careful to keep the important captions and drawings inside a "safe-zone".
- Now, there doesn't have to be a gap between boxes like in American Marvel Comics. Usually, the borders separating each panel are just thin yet bold black lines. In some cases, the borders of a given panel will be left out entirely. This technique is called 'bleeding out' frames.
This process can be done several times until the manga-ka sees the page as fit. After you've made the perfect page, ink it with inking multi-liner pens [or G-pens, whichever you prefer]. Copic and Pigma are recommended highly.

Ka-Blam! has templates for download where you can measure manga page sizes. They also publish independent comics, for those who are interested.
Use a pencil and ruler to mark margins of 4 1/2" by 7" along the edge of a sheet of 5 1/2" by 9" paper. Inside these lines is your page's safe-zone, where the finished product will be trimmed either in print or digitally.

If you don't have a lightbox to help you ink the drawings and panels, don't press very hard on the sketching pencil, or it won't erase well.