Comic ideas and how to come up with your own

The hardest part of making a comic usually isn’t the drawing — it’s the first idea. Below are story prompts sorted by genre that you can use as they are or twist into something of your own, plus a simple method for coming up with new ones when the list runs out.

Short comic strip ideas (four panels)

A short strip works best as setup — development — twist — payoff. It’s the structure of Japanese four-panel yonkoma and of many newspaper strips, and it’s perfect for a first comic.

• A cat spends all night hunting the red dot and finally catches… its owner holding the laser pointer.
• Someone rehearses for a big phone call — and it’s the delivery guy asking for the gate code.
• A snowman celebrates the first day of spring until he realizes what that means for him.
• A robot learns to smile from online tutorials and terrifies the whole office.
• A superhero saves the city but can’t open a pickle jar.
• A plant on the windowsill silently judges every life choice its owner makes.

Funny and slice-of-life ideas

• A day in the life of an office printer that hates everyone.
• Roommates split the last slice of pizza like it’s a heist movie.
• A grandma who is secretly a world-class gamer.
• A dog who writes online reviews of every guest who visits.
• Following a viral recipe step by step — and everything that goes wrong.

Fantasy and adventure ideas

• A mapmaker draws an island that doesn’t exist — and the next morning it does.
• A dragon afraid of heights trains with a knight who is afraid of dragons.
• A library where book characters come alive at night and must be back on the shelf by opening time.
• A girl swaps bodies with her cat for one day.
• The last mail carrier after the end of the world still delivers letters to survivors.

Sci-fi ideas

• Colonists on Mars receive a message from Earth that was sent a hundred years ago.
• A city where everyone can rewind time by one minute — once in their life.
• A cleaning robot on an empty space station finds a living plant.
• A weather app that is always wrong in exactly the opposite way.

Horror and mystery ideas

• In a new apartment, one more family photo appears on the wall every morning — but it isn’t your family.
• The elevator stops at a floor that isn’t on the buttons.
• A hard-boiled detective investigates who ate the birthday cake — rain, shadows and all.
• The doll in the shop window stands a little closer to the door every night.

Romance ideas

• Two strangers keep leaving notes in the same library book.
• Rivals in a baking competition are forced to share one kitchen.
• How you and your partner met — but with dragons.

Comic ideas for a gift

• A friend’s birthday as an action movie starring them.
• Your family or relationship story told as a fairy tale.
• Your pet as a superhero defending the apartment from aliens.

How to come up with your own comic idea

1. Ask “what if…?” Take something ordinary and add one impossible rule: what if you could buy an extra hour at the grocery store?
2. Mash up two things. Write a list of jobs and a list of places, pick one of each at random: a chef on a submarine, a knight at the mall.
3. Steal from real life. A strange dream, a funny thing at work, a family legend — the most alive stories are real ones pushed to the extreme.
4. Run the hero test. Check the idea with who — wants what — what’s in the way. No obstacle, no story.
5. Start from the ending. Picture the last panel — a punchline, a twist, a beautiful moment — and work backward to how the hero got there.

Once you have the idea, the next step is laying it out in panels and pages — see how to make a manga for the storyboard stage, which works the same for any comic.

How to name your comic

• Hero plus problem: The Cat Who Was Afraid of Mice.
• The key object or place: The Thirteenth Floor, The Map of Nowhere.
• Short and easy to remember — two or three words beat a long phrase.
• Don’t give away the ending in the title.

Try an idea out in a couple of minutes

If you want to see quickly how an idea looks in pictures, you can hand it to AI. In Temfy: AI Comic & Manga Maker for iPhone, you describe the plot in a sentence or two or pick a ready-made idea — a birthday, a trip, a love story, a pet hero — add photos of your heroes and choose a style; the same prompt reads very differently as manga, noir or chibi. AI draws a titled cover and one to six pages. Your first page is free; after that it’s 15 credits a page. How to write the story so AI gets it right — in how to make a comic with AI.

In short

• For a short strip: four panels with the twist in the third.
• Find ideas with “what if”, random mash-ups and real life.
• Test every idea: who — wants what — what’s in the way.
• Title: two or three words, no spoilers.