If you’re using Windows, then you might want to try CDisplay. This software is a free comic book reader (also called sequential image viewer) and is also the most popular one as far as I can tell. The program can read the images inside the comic book file in a sequential format with relative ease.

CDisplay can be configured according to your likes. To begin with, you can choose a reading layout of one or two pages at a time. CDisplay also has a lot of keyboard shortcuts so you don’t have to keep using your mouse for everything. Some of the shortcuts include keys for flipping between pages, drawing up thumbnails of all the images, and zooming in on a page for better detail.

You may come across a page that’s oriented in the wrong direction. No problem, CDisplay can rotate pages to display them properly. It can even provide color correction options. In addition, the software reads a wide variety of formats. Note that cbr and cbz files are just rar and zip files respectively, with different extensions. So, even if your comic book is in zip format, CDisplay can still read it properly.

I don’t know how many Ghacks readers are into reading comic books on their computers. Even if you’re not that big of a fan, reading a comic book on screen is still an interesting experience. Try it out and let me know what you think.

The easiest way to handle cbr files is to simply unpack them using an unpacker like IZArc or 7-zip. This unpacks all images of that specific comic and you end up with several image files in a common format.

There is however another way that takes advantage of the cbr format. Instead of unpacking the files which would make the cbr file extension pretty useless you can view them in a viewer that supports cbr files. (it would not make a difference if files would be supplied as rar or cbr files if you would unpack them in the end to view them)

The best viewer for cbr files is in my opinion the first one that emerged. It is called CDisplay and can load one or more files with the cbr extension. Linux and Mac users can take a look at this page which lists several applications for their operating systems that are able to view cbr files as well.

CDisplay can be used as any image viewer once it is installed. A click on a cbr file opens the comic book in the viewer where you can use the keyboard or mouse to navigate through the pages.

Main focus are comic series from the late 40′s to the late 70′s including well known series like Tarzan, Wonder Woman, Freedom Fighters, Green Lantern and The Flash. All issues are available for download as .cbr files which are nothing else than renamed .rar files. You can simply unrar the files or use a special cbr viewer like Cdisplay to view them directly without unraring them first.

Update: The Comic Books Archive online library links currently to 902 comic books. All you need to do to access the comics is to click on the catalog link in the main navigation bar. This displays a list of all series that are available on the site.

Just click on a series to be taken to a page that is listing all available books. Books are displayed with their name, publication date and availability on the site. Available comics can be downloaded in cbr format with a left-click. There is unfortunately no option to read the comics directly on the site.

The site has not been updated for over a year, which suggests that it is no longer actively maintained by its creator. New functionality or comic books have not been added to the site since then. Still, with 902 comic books to download, this site has much to offer for comic book lovers.

I’d also suggest to check out the link section which links to other websites where you find information and downloads for additional comic book series.