I have a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics pad and people who hear I am an artist often think that I use it to draw.
Well, not exactly. I use it more for playing online computer games than for drawing!
But it's real function in my life is for retouching line art and photos. Generally when cartooning I start with a soft pencil on newsprint and then transfer the image by hand to white paper where I ink over the pencil. Next I take a picture of my drawing with a digital camera. My Canon Powershot has a 1Gb multimedia card that I can insert into my laptop's card reader. I open the file with Paintshop Pro (the last version before JASC was bought out includes PSP and Animation Shop) and that is when I start using the graphics pad.
Here is an editing sequence showing how I got from the hand drawn cartoon to a drawing I posted previously: