You can also use GraphicsMagick, a lighter and faster fork of ImageMagick:
gm convert image1.png image2.png -append combined.png
A simple time comparison of merging 12 images:
time convert image{1..12}.jpg -append test.jpg
real 0m3.178s
user 0m3.850s
sys 0m0.376s
time gm convert image{1..12}.jpg -append test.jpg
real 0m1.912s
user 0m2.198s
sys 0m0.766s
GraphicsMagick is almost twice as fast as ImageMagick.