Comic Book and Manga Reader Programs
June 23, 2008
These programs are specifically intended for reading comic books or manga. All are either open source or free or both. I use CDisplayEX, but each program has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Sequential image viewer intented for reading manga and comics. You can drag and drop folders, images and arhives in it and it can read images from within nested archives (.zip inside .rar).
Loads JPEG, PNG and static GIF images which are automatically ordered and presented for viewing one at a time or two at a time. Automatic page sizing: none; fit to screen, fit to width of screen, fit to width of screen if oversized, display at specific height, or display two pages.
CDisplayEx is a Comic reader based on CDisplay. It use the popular 7-zip plugins to read many archives types like cbr cbz cbt rar zip tar 7z lzh arj cab tar.gz tar.bz2. It supports jpeg png gif and bmp images.
The updated program adds support for rar’s, bookmarks, viewing text files embedded in chapter archives, handles ‘odd’ file names well, ignores unexpected, non-supported/non-image/non-text files, fixes flicker problem viewing ‘Gif’ images, has an optional more streamlined viewing screen, has improved browsing for manga folders and manga folder management.
Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It reads images in ZIP, RAR or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files. It is written in Python and uses GTK+ through the PyGTK bindings.
Comical is an easy-to-use, featureful GUI comic book viewer, written in C++ using wxWidgets.
It is an all in one solution to read your eComics and also manage your library. You can think of it as a kind of ITunes for eComics with lots of the same functionality.
Find more on the Z-Cult FM Ziki.
