also, would anyone know what a good scanner would be for a large format? How many dpi's would should i be looking for?

Well the artist I'm collaborating with (I'm the writer). Works directly in painter to do his illustrations and he uses 300 dpi reseloution. I then import his work into "Microsoft Publisher (which came free with my pc) and a free PDF file maker I downloaded from the net. The results are not so bad...you can see a mock up of what we are working on here...

akuaro.com/webphotos/testpa.pdf

Not bad for first effort and I really want to thank Jaime for his help!!! I'm really thrilled that I didn't have to go out and by a bunch of expensive new equipment.

I'd reccomend working at 300 dpi even if you're just doing it as a webcomic. A lot of webcomic artists end up collecting their comics into books eventually. You might never get to that point, but why rule it out, right? After all, you can always make the resolution lower, but you can never make it higher again. It takes a little more compute time to work with, but I think it's worth it if you might even possibly consider printing the comics at some point.

If you have 500kb file sizes, you must either be saving as the wrong format, or your resolution is too high. To get the file size down, make sure the comic is 72 DPI (save it as a copy of the 300dpi one) and try saving as a medium quality JPEG. There are other formats such as .PNG that can be smaller if you use B+W or very flat colors, but if you use shading or complex color patterns, JPEG is the way to go. If you do go with JPEGs, experiment with the quality level to see how small you can make the file without getting those squarish "artifacts". Some images can even be saved at a "low" setting and work fine. I think most of the 30kb ones you're referring to are "medium", though, or even "high".