The Storyboard

1What the Storyboard is

A comic issue gives you three ways to work on it, shown as a segmented switch: Storyboard, Pages and Publish. Pages is where you make the book (draw, upload, reorder, set covers) and Publish ships it. The Storyboard is the odd one out and the subject of this guide: an infinite whiteboard where every page sits as a card and you think on top of them. Its own blurb says it plainly, "Plan and rough on an infinite board. Never printed."

Keep this distinction clear: the Storyboard is where the issue gets planned and argued over; the page canvas (reached from Pages) is where the art actually gets drawn. They are linked, but they are not the same surface. The Storyboard sits above the work, a place to survey it, never to finish it.

2Open the Storyboard

Open a comic or zine issue and look at the Content tab's segmented switch, Storyboard · Pages · Publish. It opens on Pages by default, so tap Storyboard to swing the whiteboard open, to see the whole issue at once. The choice rides the page address, so a link straight to the Storyboard reopens the Storyboard. Want the wall to have the entire window? Hit Full screen.

You can also turn the Storyboard off entirely. A Storyboard view setting (Inherit, On or Off) exists at studio, project and asset level; switch it off and the pill shows only Pages and Publish. Turning it off only hides the view, it never deletes any board work.

3Bring the pages in

A fresh board is a blank wall: you will see Nothing on the storyboard yet and a single button, Bring in the pages. Press it and every page of the issue lands as a card, each showing its thumbnail (or a No art yet placeholder) with a Page {n} label underneath. Cards pick up small chips when they apply, like Hidden or Not for backers, so the wall mirrors the real state of the issue.

Need a brand new page? Add page creates a real blank page and drops its card here, and it shows up in Pages too, because the cards are your actual pages. Two tidy-up buttons keep things sane as you work. Add missing pages drops any new pages below what is already there, and Tidy pages snaps everything back into reading order (it checks first: Tidy the pages into reading order?).

4Move around the wall

The board has no scrollbars, because you don't scroll it, you move the wall itself. Two tools live at the left of the rail. Select (press V) picks up cards and notes to reposition them. Pan (press H) grabs the whole wall and drags it under you. Zoom out to around 22% to read the whole issue's shape at a glance, then zoom back in to fuss over one corner. If the faint grid dots help you line things up, leave them on; if they distract, switch them off. Handy: the board remembers your pan, your zoom, and whether the notes rail was open, saved per issue, so you drop right back where you left off.

5Sticky notes

Stickies are the running commentary of making a comic, a note you pin right next to the work. Reach for the Sticky note tool (or just press N), click where you want it, and start typing. There is no second click, no hunting for a text field. The sticky opens ready for words the instant it lands.

Use them like margin notes: a reminder by a panel, a colour note, a blunt "fix this hand." They come in seven colours, Yellow (the default), Pink, Blue, Green, Orange, Violet and Grey, so colour-code them however your team thinks. When you are done, click away or press escape to set it down.

6Text and frames

Two more tools for shaping the wall, and neither of them is a sticky. Text (press T, then click) drops a plain floating label wherever you land. No card, no frame behind it, just words: a heading over a cluster of roughs, or a caption tucked beside one page. Frame (press F) drops a labelled box, its default label just Frame, that you drag out around a group of cards to fence off an act, a chapter, or a "still to draw" pile. The split is simple: a sticky is a note, text is a bare label, a frame is a boundary you group things inside. Reach for text when you want to name something, and a frame when you want to say "everything in here belongs together."

7Shapes and arrows

Now you add logic to the wall. The Shape tool (press S) drops a box in one of four kinds: Rectangle, Ellipse, Diamond or Triangle. Use shapes the way you'd use a highlighter or a lasso: ring a cluster of pages that form one scene, box off the act break, circle the beat you keep second-guessing.

The Arrow tool (press C) is a connector. Drag from one object to another and you draw a line between them, or fling it out to empty space if the target doesn't exist yet. This is how flow becomes visible: this page leads to that one, this idea feeds that scene, cause pointing at effect straight across the whiteboard.

8Draw roughs on the board

Sometimes a word won't do and you just need to scribble. The Draw tool (press D) is a real brush pen for thinking with your hand: a gesture rough, a quick thumbnail, a circle around the panel that isn't working, an arrow you'd rather sketch than place. Pick a brush, Pen, Marker, Pencil or Airbrush, set the size, colour and flow, and mark up the wall wherever you like. There is no canvas to drop first: you draw straight on the board, and each stroke lands as its own object you can move, resize or delete.

The tool says it plainly: "Draw straight on the board. Ink stays on the board; drawing over a page here never changes the page itself." So a stroke over a page card is board ink, a rough note living on top. Start a stroke over a card and it clings to that card, riding along when you move it.

9Drop in images

Sometimes a note is not enough and you just need the picture pinned up where everyone can see it. Two ways to get images onto the board: hit Add an image on the tool rail to open a file picker, or drag files straight from your computer onto the canvas. They land as image objects you move and resize like any other thing on the wall.

Use them the way you would tack things to a cork board: a mood board for the issue, a photo reference for a tricky pose, a colour swatch to hold the palette, a panel from an earlier issue you want to match, or a scan of a paper thumbnail. The board is where the reference lives so the whole team is looking at the same thing.

10Comment pins and the notes rail

Some notes belong to a spot, not a conversation. Grab the Comment pin tool (press M) and drop a pin anywhere on the wall. It opens a full comment thread, anchored right where you meant: this panel, this beat, this awkward gutter. Pins carry threaded replies, and you mark them resolved once handled. Open the notes rail beside the board to see them gathered up, and a page card with an unresolved badge still has open notes. Usefully, these are the same comments used everywhere else in the studio, so a pin you drop here also feeds the issue's wider unresolved triage. Nothing raised on the wall slips through the cracks.

11Everyone shares one board

There is one whiteboard per issue, and everyone with access to that issue is looking at the same wall. Who can change it follows your issue role: an author or above gets the full tool rail and can edit; a lower role sees the board read-only, no tools, just the shape of the plan. The board is honest about being shared without pretending to be live. An As of stamp shows when it last loaded, and Refresh pulls in what your teammates have moved since. Edit the same moment as someone else? The rule is last-write-wins on a single item, never a scrambled document. Worst case, one small change gets redone. No mangled wall, no lost afternoon.

12Go live (the Enterprise seat)

By default the whiteboard is the Refresh-to-see-changes surface from the last section. Live collaboration is a separate, opt-in capability: turn it on and several people work the same board at once, with changes landing within about a second. A face stack of everyone else on the wall joins the toolbar (four sets of initials, then a small plus-count), and the As of stamp stays exactly where it was, now keeping itself current as each change lands. Go quiet and a corner Paused card tells you the live connection stopped but your work is still saving; tap I'm back to resume, since it never does so on its own. It rides the Enterprise plan at $50 a seat per month, and needs two switches: the studio holds the capability, and the owner hands you a seat on the Plan & billing page.

13From the board to the page

The board is where you rough things out; the page canvas is where you draw them properly, and the two are joined by the Light box. Double-click a page card on the board to open that page in the canvas, and the board content sitting over that card (your roughs, arrows, notes) comes through underneath your work like art on a light table, so you draw the finished page on top of your own thumbnail.

In the canvas the light box is a locked reference row in the Layers panel with three settings: Full, Half and Off. Full shows the board content at working strength, Half drops it to a faint ghost to trace over, and neither is ever solid (its sub-label notes it is "Reference only, never printed"). Opening a page straight from the board lands on Half, since a ghost is what you draw over. Separately, from the Pages view, every page tile carries a brush button labelled Draw on {page} (for example "Draw on Page 3") that takes you straight into the canvas for that page.

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