Banzchan
I don't remember if I asked you how'd you like that screen program you showed me at Wizard World, yet. Did you give it a twirl and you feel its worth picking up?
I'm still trying to get a feel for it (ComicWorks), but here's a basic rundown:
It's a layer-based system. You could theoretically use it to make a black and white comics page from start to finish, though you can import drawings you've already made if they're in the right format.
So, you could start with your tablet and create a greyscale "sketch" layer to put down layouts. The layers can have independent resolution, so if your art's primary resolution is normally 600 dpi, you could make your sketch layer 150 dpi.
After you sketch, you can "ink" the drawing by creating another layer. This would be a simple 2-bit B&W layer. It's pretty much like drawing on Photoshop or Open Canvas. I haven't quite mastered the pen tools yet. There's some odd thing going on with the pressure sensitivity on my system, and I may just try some work with fixed widths, anyway, since I normally work with marker-type pens...
Anyway, once you ink your pic you can create a new layer and apply tones. They have a number of different methods you can use to do this, such as creating a new ink layer, blacking in some areas where you want tones to be, and then using the equivalent of a paintbucket to "fill" the areas with a screen. There's also some routines for selecting areas with a mask, and filling that way. You can also slap a whole variety of layers down for different parts (say, line art on one layer, panel borders on another, so on and so forth) and use some layers to trim or otherwise affect other layers.
So far, I haven't run into too much that you couldn't ultimately do with Photoshop or similar programs if you were clever enough. For instance, they have "white layers" and "inverse layers" which you can use for various effects, but these are things you could duplicate in most decent graphics programs. The tone patterns are pretty sweet, but if you had some sort of Photoshop-generated tone, it's the same principle - a bitmap pattern - though I think some of the basic dot tones and gradients may be generated on the spot by some sort of engine. They let you rotate the angle of the dot screen without changing the direction of a gradient tone, for instance...
The speedline tool is something I haven't seen duplicated in some other program. You can set parameters such as density and direction, randomness, etc, and then drag out a box (onto a new layer) that draws the lines automatically. You have to spend some time cutting away the parts of the line box you don't want to appear, but again, that's a task people accustomed to digital art are familiar with.
There's also some interesting looking ruler tools, but I haven't gotten around to fully exploring those yet.
On the whole, most of this program is a collection of tools that anyone with a graphics program already has, with one or two that are new to me. In many ways, the big advantage to the program (like the paper) is convenience - since all the tools are pre-calibrated and arranged in a way that is supposedly more specifically convenient to the black and white comics artist - plus there's a bunch of tones and patterns packaged with it (100 standard tones and 140 patterns) in multiple resolutions, so you don't have to go to the trouble of creating/searching/downloading them.
(ComicWorks does have a color layer ability, but it's not all that great - sort of like a sketch layer with colored pencils, though if you really wanted to fight it you could probably make a passable color picture.)
For the money, it's a crapshoot. It's certainly not nearly as expensive as a full version of Photoshop, but if you already have PS or a comparable program and don't mind spending the extra time in setup and the like, then you probably don't need this program.
