DIALOGS
Our way of working is to create all the pages in CorelDRAW, which you can do as soon as you have your sketched layout (Adobe users may prefer Illustrator and InDesign). With aid of the magnetic help lines created at the beginning all the panel frames are drawn in seconds and because our measurements have been decided upon in advance, it always fits perfectly. After that the required panels are imported and placed where they should be, making sure the bitmaps are shifted underneath the frames. Vector frames will give you a crisper line than manually drawing them.
Now come the dialogs. Either you already have them on paper, or you make it up as you go along. A lot of artists still do the lettering manually, but others, like us, prefer to do this by computer, especially if your handwriting isn't that neat and tidy. There are many comic fonts to choose from these days, so it should be doable to find the one that fits your style.
Then there's also the use of sound effects. Some artists hate them and use them as rarely as possible if not at all, others use them whenever they can. We prefer to use them when we feel it's necessary, though like with the extreme close-up and other special shots we don't want to over use them. Sound effect fonts are usually much fatter and different from dialog fonts. As with the last one there is plenty to choose from on the internet.
Petra makes up the dialog as she goes along most of the time (sometimes a good idea pops into her head while working on the script of layout). Once the text is there the balloons are drawn. In our comic the balloons are rectangular with the corners bended by 25%. By turning the shape into a curve (with a click of a button) curve points can be added to add the direction points.
Again, make sure at least one other person reads the dialogs in case you've missed spelling errors. With webcomics mistakes can be corrected at any time, but once you start publishing in print, you have to make sure all errors are gone.