Hi there
@WhiteEkans.
Firstly for bringing your drawings into a digital form:
When scanning your pages remember that scanners are basically taking a picture of your pages with a very bright flash. Your scanner should have settings you can adjust if you are scanning from a computer. If you have the option, select
Grayscale or
Color, NOT
Black & White because B & W will remove all the grey colours that make you are likely relying upon for details.
You could also try and simply
draw darker. This will make the scanner put more detail into your image (because the average scanner will fade out light grey colours regardless of your settings).
An alternative to scanners is simply using a camera (like your phone camera) and adjusting the image later. Make sure you have good lighting on the page AND that you
don't have any shadows on the page when you take the picture.
If you have shadows/bad lighting it can be very hard to correct the image unless you are a digital image wiz, which isn't your forte (as you have said).
Should you invest in a digital tablet?
"Not right now" would be my answer to you. You are already comfortable with physical drawing and even though you might be making a digital comic, a digital tablet will likely only hinder you at this stage. Drawing tablets open up a wide range of interesting ways you can create art but it's not like they are a direct evolution of paper. They are equal because they are different. If you are good at one medium, the other medium may have benefits in various ways but you can just make do with what you have.
There are certainly positives as you have no doubt researched, but you have to realise that
you do not have to use one in order to draw comics/manga-style.
Think of all of the manga artists out there that draw insanely detailed and complex lineworks with paper, still to this day. Of course, an amazing digital artist could do the same, but what I am saying is that an amazing paper artist could do the same as a digital artist.
Now, there is nothing stopping you from getting one to assist with digital effects/colouring (which you may find quite useful) and you could use them both together. It doesn't have to replace your hand-drawing with paper. If I ever made a manga I would probably do it like this. A combination of hand-drawing and digital art.
If you must get a tablet, definitely get one with a display, but don't just go speeding off to Wacom's corner because you have plenty of good budget options (no, cheaper tablets are not automatically a bad option. They share the majority of the functionality that the de-facto standard does).
Now, regarding your copyright.
Depending how important the story is to you there is a lot of things you can do to protect your work from copying... but it is basically unnecessary. The people who have enough talent (few and far between) to make your story complete or draw it as a manga will not ever want to copy your idea. To most people who would be your peers, it would feel disgusting to them to copy your work.
I have an analogy here, you can look at it like this:
You are shopping at a supermarket and you have a trolley that is full of things you want to buy.
Of course there are many others with trolleys that are wandering around.
Now imagine that you go off to get something from a shelf and somebody just randomly steals your trolley. Could you imagine it?
It would mean that either: they have ditched their own trolley in order to take yours, or they were walking around a supermarket just so they could steal your trolley!
How random would that be!
And that is basically is with original story ideas. There are just so many of them around and people have their own ideas. Think about the supermarket analogy again:
If somebody randomly stole your trolley, it may have a lot of stuff they don’t want in it, right?
You story may have bits they don’t like, or the artwork is not how they want to draw it and so they would change it. In that case:
they are no longer even making your story!
So you don’t have to worry about that.
But what you should be careful of is posting your full or complete manga/story for review.
In that case, people with nothing better to do could simply repost the whole thing under their own name and you won’t get credit unless you have a following!
Remember: Posting tid-bits/previews — basically essential. It can give you essential information to make your story better and it can get you a following before you have even posted the first chapter (if you do it enough and it’s interesting).
Never: Complete the whole manga/story and then post the entire thing ‘for review’ or something like that. If you have completed it, post it on multiple sites like this one so it is immediately credited to you. If you don’t, someone could simply swoop in and repost it under their name just like you fear.
And if you want inspiration for making your manga, specifically: how people have already done it, you can
search here on Mangadex for "User Created" tag manga. There are really no requirements to create your own things.
Just make something you are happy with and then go from there.