How to Write Your First Manga (No Skills Required)

Sat Nov 29 2025

TLDR: Stop overthinking and execute. A story only needs three things: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even if your ending is garbage, a finished manga beats an imaginary masterpiece.

1: Have a story with a beginning, middle and end.
2: Practice how to explain it concisely to others without rotting their brain
3: Create an outline in a format you understand (Storyboard, Screenplay or notes)

If you have pink nipples above your neck (also known as a brain), you have the ability to create a manga. Simple as that.

I'm going to walk you through step by step how I wrote Pan Airways in 12 weeks, my very first screenplay and fully fledged manga.

Step 1: Have a Story with a Beginning, Middle, and End

This is the bare minimum. It can simply be a story about a forgetful fish trying to find his way home. (Finding Nemo?)

Find a format that you like and use it. I personally prefer to keep my ideas in a simple Google Doc with a title, synopsis and some images of what it would look like from other products.

Here is a real example of an idea I wrote in December 2022 called My Guardian (Black Baby) 흑형.

Title	The Korean Experience / Jo Jo's Bizarre Toddlers
Logline	You're a Korean baby born with a "Stand" or inner DMX monologue, only the narrator, other babies and their Black-Stands can hear.
Genre	Jojo's Bizarre Toddlers
Plot	You're a Korean baby that refuses to talk, trying to make sense of the world. Your parents are newly married parents going through some harsh times. Need help playing with a crush at nursery? Black-stand has got your back. Grandma feeding you too much food? Black-stand has the solution. A criminal breaking into the home, fear not! Black-stand knows exactly what you should do. Think you're the only Korean baby with a Black-Stand? Nope.
Style / Theme	Gags gone wild. Make friends at daycare, catch a criminal, help your father get a job, battle with your grandparents. All dialogue from adults is in Korean. The player has to make it to their 100-day birthday party or family gathering Maybe?? If you play the game in Korean, the language is North Korean or Japanese or maybe some made up Japanese/Koreanglish. Toddlers with 10 packs?

2022 me thought this was the most hilarious idea on the planet. So I decided to move to the next step.

Step 2: Iterate and Learn to Explain It Concisely

I kept the scope limited to get a quick proof of concept. I took a pen and paper and wrote 400 words of what the first chapter would be about. Its beginning, middle and end.

Doing so resulted in the idea of a short story from the original now called My Baby Is Strange, a one shot manga. The plot is all over the place but the core elements are the same.

"A Black male from America is Isekai'd into a Korean baby"

I then opened up MSPaint and literally drew out the whole story in less than 14 manga pages per chapter. They were not pretty.

Unfortunately, I've lost the original My Baby Is Strange MSPaint drawings. But I do have the originals for a spinoff story that came the very next day.

The idea came from a question "What if instead of a black person being isekai'd into another world, it was two friends being reborn into Japan as office workers"

and thus "Being Salaryman" was born.

As you can see, it ain't pretty. But things are clear enough to get the general gist of what will happen despite having poor dialogue.

I literally sent the above images along with some dialogue to an artist and the result is this beautiful glory of a Chapter 1 for Being Salaryman.

The story was not great, the plot confusing, but the idea is now set in stone. It's always possible to go back and retcon the work!

Step 3: Create an Outline/Storyboard in Your Format

I personally prefer treating Chapter 1 like a pilot or prototype. Once it's made you can always re-iterate, retcon, redo and change the events to make a more concrete story how you imagine it.

You'll need this concrete story unless you're making an anthology.

At this point, you're probably wondering how I went from Black Baby to Pan Airways. Well.

I created an outline for Black Baby and came to the realisation "What if this was a game, a simple one". If I could crunch down the scope and theme I could probably make it into a game, and manga.

Instead of the character being sent to Korea as a baby, what if they are stuck working for a greedy airline company (I HATE JFK AIRPORT) and must earn as much money as possible for the airline.

Is this a huge pivot? Yes, but in my case, I find asking "Why" questions pivotal in driving ideas. And thus Pan Airways was born.

It's Papers Please in Planet of the Apes at an airport.

This is still a huge contrast from the manga, but I'm happy to delve into how I arrived at the Pan Airways manga and world building in another article if anyone is interested.