You have this hot new idea for a comic strip. You can't even afford Paint Shop Pro. Here's a guide to what is out there, from the starving artist to the campus student. I'll describe Linux , an open source operating system, as well as Gimp and SANE , which can replace Photoshop for all your graphics needs. I'll tell you how to use Windows' TrueType fonts.
Comic strips are very memory intensive.
Check your machine. Even though you may be able to get away with even 32 megs of memory, the more memory you can throw at it, the better. Also, Windows 95 and greater are known memory hogs, and aren't quite tuned to be memory efficient. This affects performance greatly as Windows will load all of itself in only to swap it out back again. With the main bottleneck out of the way, take a look at your processor speed.