Reading and archiving comics in a digital format

Holy Comic. Cache, Batman!

By Andreas Kneib

When Superman first saw the light of day in 1938, nobody could really guess how powerful electronic computing machines would become. Comics were printed on cheap paper or appeared as strips in the daily newspapers. In today's information society, where hard disks have reached terabyte proportions, a number of tools let you view comics in a web browser. One of the most sophisticated readers is the Comix [1] tool.

CBZ and CBR

The reader uses the special CBZ (Comic Book ZIP) and CBR (Comic Book RAR) file formats. Basically, both CBZ and CBR are just normal ZIP or RAR archives, which you can unpack at the command line if you have the right tools in place.

As you can see from Listing 1, the comic.cbz sample file contains image files called image_00.jpg, image_01.jpg, image_02.jpg, and so on. The trick here is that Comix unpacks the individual images one after another in the background to support uninterrupted reading and browsing, just like in a web browser or a digital book.

01 $ unzip comic.cbz
02 Archive:  comic.cbz
03   inflating: image_00.jpg
04   inflating: image_01.jpg
05   inflating: image_02.jpg
06   inflating: image_03.jpg
07   inflating: image_04.jpg
08 [...]

Into the World of Images!

After launching the reader by typing comix in a text console, or via your desktop's application menu, the program comes up with a tidy interface, which is currently quite empty. To provide reading material, you will not want to draw and scan your own comic or download illegal copies of comics from file-sharing hosters. Thankfully, don't have to; instead, you can access free stories.

As your first port of call, I would recommend searching the Collins Compendium of Free Online Comic Books [3]. Of course, your favorite search engine will probably turn out some interesting results, too. Your journey could take you, say, to Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now [4] or to Sword of My Mouth [5].

Once you have found a story that you enjoy and have downloaded it to your computer, you can open it in the reader by selecting File | Open in the menu, or pressing the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O. Alternatively, launch Comix in the shell by typing comix filename (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Launch the Comix reader, and it will present comic stories such as these in a clear-cut interface.

Where to Find What

The tool's layout is reminiscent of a web browser or a PDF reader, and the learning curve is correspondingly gentle. The header contains the main menu with the File, Edit, View, Go, Bookmarks, and Help entries.

If you have a large collection of comics, you might be interested in the options listed below File | Open library or Add to library. These options let you create and manage preview windows with the title images of selected comics, thus helping you find and open the story you are looking for more quickly.

The File menu also has an Unpack image item that lets you save the active comic page as a single image file or view detailed information on the image in Properties.

The program configuration is accessible via Edit | Settings, where you can define the background color and the start and scroll behavior and preview images - in fact all of the program settings in this window. This section of the program, including the options and switches, is fairly intuitive.

The main View menu provides functions such as full-screen mode, the ability to set the page height and width, a slide show, or a magnifying glass. By pressing Z, you can enable and disable the magnifying glass at any time. The View menu also lets you modify the appearance and handling of the reader via the Toolbars item.

Bookmarks

One of the most important menu items is Bookmarks. Here, you can set and edit bookmarks, just as in a web browser. The last item in the main menubar, Help, is slightly spartan: Instead of taking you to the program's internal online help, it simply shows the hapless user an info box that points to the project website. Having said this, the reader has an intuitive structure, and the lack of a help function might not be too important.

Below the main menu, you will see the navigation and view layers. The arrows for browsing the comic or changing the reading direction for Manga-style comics, are available in the main menu below View and Go, but buttons in the navigation bar make the whole thing so much easier.

In addition to the menus mentioned thus far, the program also has a pop-up menu that appears when you right-click. This takes you to the most important actions, such as opening comic book archives, bookmarks, the library, or the settings window.

The reading area of Comix, which is below the toolbars, is divided into two sections. On the right is the main window with a view of the active comic page; on the left is the preview window with thumbnails of all the pages. This helps you keep track of even large-scale, convoluted stories.

The program still displays page numbers if you use it as a normal image viewer. If you point Comix at the images in the current directory, it will enumerate and display them like the pages of a comic book for you to browse (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Comix will show a page number and a preview for normal images, too.

Conclusion

Comics are not just stories with pictures for kids anymore. Now, thanks to dedicated tools like Comix, anybody with a computer can conveniently view and digitize their comics.