The idea of trying a 50-page publication in 2-columns, with graphics, makes me shudder. If you have Microsoft Office on your computer, could be worth checking out Publisher. In Publisher, you can draw text boxes to serve as your columns on one page. You can link the text boxes so text will flow. You can leave a blank page on your list of pages and duplicate it with content every time you need a new page. The text boxes are completely independent of each other except for how you choose to flow the text. That means if you want to resize each box a little or a lot on one page, it's as simple as one click and drag with no worries about changing the size of anything you didn't select.

Under certain circumstances, Word can get real stubborn when managing columns. Publisher is super flexible in this regard. In general, if you want something to look like a book or a magazine, Publisher is tooled better for those projects than Word. Word is more for papers and reports - in my opinion.