I’m sure I’ve mentioned decoupage as a way to decorate shoes before now, but Anomalous Musings has a particularly nice tutorial on how to customize with comic books.

Step 1: Cut up your comic book.

I know, I know – that’s like promoting sacrilege, but it’ll be worth it. Just don’t just do it haphazardly. Go through the book looking for the scenes, characters, speech bubbles, and lettering that you want to feature. I would recommend nothing much bigger than about silver dollar-sized. If in doubt, hold it up against your shoes and see if it’ll lay flat. (I wound up with a bunch of stuff that was too big, because I didn’t actually look at the shoes while cutting).

You can easily find suitable comics at thrift stores and eBay–I’m thinking particularly of the old “Tomb of Dracula” stuff or the wonderfully gruesome pre-comics-code E.C. Comics publications like “Vault of Horror” and “Tales from the Crypt.”

Carefully selecting images and word balloons will result in a fascinating, and completely unique, pair of shoes. Leftovers that are too big for the shoes could be made into earrings or a pendant.