Best 5 Comic Reader Apps

Most of us, especially the ones born before early 90s, are sure to get nostalgic about reading comic books. That was a real fun way to spend the leisure time. Nowadays, we have our smart devices with interesting apps to cut our free time. But if we can get out comic books back in digital form and enjoy them through our smart device, won’t it be good? 

Comic reader apps are just meant to serve this purpose. There are comic readers for Windows, Linux, and Mac that operate as sequential image viewer and can also offer you good comic reading experience over a digital platform. 

Let us know about the best 5 comic reader apps to keep enjoying comics in digital way:

CDisplay/CDisplayEx (Windows)

Developer and comic lover David Ayton, developed and introduced CDisplay sometimes before 2003. This app is meant to provide you a simple platform through which you can enjoy digital comic on your desktop, laptop or tab. CDisplay is a sequential image viewer that optimizes the comic images. It is a lightweight, image viewer that resizes the images so that it fits to screens of different sizes.  Also, it is capable of doing color corrections.

David Ayton passed away in 2003 and after that CDisplay passed to the developers of CDisplayEx, an open source comic viewer. CDisplayEx added many new features to the original, such as

·         Integrated 7zip plugin, which makes image viewing images inside the archives easy

·         It supports PDF files

·         It adds multi-language support and more. 

CDisplay is available even today but no more development work is done on it. CDisplayEx is under development presently. 

ComicRack (Windows)

ComicRack is a free comic reader for Windows. This is an efficient app as it is capable of exporting almost any comic book file. It also offers wide ranging image viewing support through ZIP, RAR, and 7z. This kills the need of unpacking the archives. The app comes with three-paned interface using which you can navigate through folders and files inside the app. The interface is simple as the reader just needs to browse the comics in the bottom pane and can easily read pages at the top. Another interesting feature that makes ComicRack unique is that it allows you to keep your favorite comics together in one collection, which you can pack up as a CBZ file. These files can be exported to the archive; hence the comic is readable on other devices also. ComicRack also supports sharing of comic library over a home network.

SimpleComic (Mac)

If you are a Mac user and looking for a simple comic reader with a good interface then SimpleComic is the right choice. It supports the windowed as well as full-screen comic views. If you are not in the full-screen window, then also the app can scale the pages to the size of the window. The app also has added features like translation, notes keeping in the metadata, etc. It is completely an open source application therefore it is fast, free and intuitive.

Comix (Linux)

For Linux environment, Comix is a nice and simple comic reader. This app is designed to handle sequential images through a simple interface. In this app, the pages of your comic book run down to the left side of the screen, whereas the large pane on the right side shows the current active pages. The app supports ZIP, RAR, or .tar files. It can easily handle a plain folder, full of images. The app is free, open source, light-weight, and can easily get the job done. However, to run Comix, first you need to get Python, Python Information Library (PIL), PyGTK+ (or another GTK+ framework) installed in your PC.

MangaMeeya (Windows)

MangaMeeya is a good Windows comic reader for the manga fans. Manga are the comics created in Japan. This app supports translation notes and the right to left reading (the way the manga is read). This doesn’t mean MangaMeeya is only good for manga, it is just that it also supports manga reading. The app is great as it allows the reading of multiple pages at once, and supports customization of key commands for the easy browsing of images. Overall, it works well as a sequential image viewer, even if you're not reading manga or comics. The app also supports image-browsing through RAR and ZIP archives.

If you are comic lover, then you must download any of the aforementioned best 5 comic reader apps and enjoy reading. All these apps are open source, lightweight and available for free.