The comics medium is a powerful tool for communication. It employs the language of both text and images. The placement, interrelationship and transition of panels, speech balloons, gutters, lines, script and picture plane are some of the elements that evoke a sense of time and place in comics. The success of comics as an effective medium depends on experiences common to both the creator and audience. In the light of this understanding of the language of comics, and theorisation regarding the ‘production’ of culture, this article analyses the creation procedure of a comic book made to communicate health messages among schoolchildren under a health project run by the directorate of Vector Borne Disease Control Programme in India. Designing Communications 2 2 Name changed. I have used pseudo names for all the private institutes and professionals. , a private agency contracted by the government for its public health programmes, became the site for this production process. The production involved various ‘actants’ 3 3 A. J. Greimas (1983) developed the actantial model where he talked about six actants or facets that define a narrative algorithm. These actants include the subject, the object, the sender, the receiver, the helper and the opponent. This model was further used by Bruno Latour and others in the development of actor–network theory (widely known as ANT) where the focus shifted from action to systems or networks. from the field. It was also constrained by the limits set by the ‘genre’, hence a specific art world. I call the production of such a comic book a ‘creative production’ because it involves a dynamic interplay between the artists’ creativity and the bureaucratic boundaries of the profession of advertising. Following Howard Becker’s idea that artistic production is collective, I describe the detailed contribution of major actors involved in the process of comic book production.