Amazon for instance offers digital collections of many Marvel comics. Examples? The complete Amazing Spider-Man comic book collection for $94, Iron Man for $72.99 or 40 Years of X-Men for $104. All of these collections include hundreds of digital comic books.

Regardless of how you acquire the digital comics books, you still need a suitable program to read them on the computer. And that’s where the problems begin. Some comic books come as pdf documents, others as individual image files or packed in archives, or in cbr or cbz containers.

A digital comic viewer such as CoView supports the majority of formats (all with the exception of pdf). The keyboard driven program starts up in fullscreen mode. The program shortcuts are displayed on the screen on start up. Important for new users are F1 to bring up the shortcut list again, F2 to open an individual comic file, F5 to open a comic book collection and i to change the program language from English to one of the other supported languages (Spanish, Portuguese among others).

The interface itself is very minimalistic, only two small interface elements are shown if a comic is open in the digital comic viewer.

New users will have to display the help contents on the screen in the beginning to look up the program’s keyboard shortcuts. While it is possible to perform some actions with the mouse, most are only accessible via those keyboard shortcuts.

Here is a list of useful shortcuts:

• 1 – Fit to screen
• 7 – Continuous Mode
• 8 – Fit to two pages
• Space – Next page
• Backspace – previous page
• n – next comic
• r – rotate
• m – add bookmark
• l – list all bookmarks
• c – change background color
• Esc – Exit program
• q – minimize program

The mouse can only be used to flip through pages, zoom in or out and perform other basic operations.

CoView is a very handy comic book viewer for the Windows operating system. The only issue that I personally had with it during use is that it cannot be used to view comics in a window.

CoView can be downloaded as a portable version or installer from the developer website.

Third party comic readers and downloaders are not that common. We have reviewed a few that concentrate on Mangas, those popular Japanese comics. Among them Manga Crawler or Manga Downloader.

Comical is one of the few applications that offers web coming viewing and downloading capabilities. The program needs to be installed before it can be started. Comical then displays a list of supported comics in a sidebar in its interface, and the comics or instructions in the larger main part of the program window.

Comics are downloaded by simply double-clicking comic titles in the sidebar. This downloads the latest available comic of the series. The Comics menu at the top displays an option to download older comics from the series (called Download all unread). This option is not available for all supported comics though.

Controls at the top can be used to flip through the comics, or open the directory where they have been downloaded to.

Comical can furthermore check all supported comic websites for updates, and display indications of available updates to the user.

Information about comics are stored in an XML file in the program directory. It is possible to load a custom user generated XML file to add comic strips and websites. The developer adds new comics to the available database regularly as well.

Comical is an easy to use comic viewer and downloader. The program could use some comfort options, like an option to subscribe to select comics to make sure they are updated automatically whenever the program is running, and better in comic options to navigate between comics.

Comical is a free program for the Windows operating system. It does require the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. The comic reader and downloader is available for download at the developer website over at Bootblock.co.uk.

He might even need to navigate to another part of the website to view different comics that are posted there. That’s not very user friendly and Mirth is the solution for every comic buff.

First of all it’s Open Source and available for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s also portable at least on Windows – the version that I tried. Mirth needs to be unpacked to a directory and can be started right from that directory.

The software displays the first comic immediately after startup and new users will be a bit lost because there are no apparent controls or menus available at that point. Everything is handled by the keyboard, here are the most helpful keyboard shortcuts.

Left and Right switch to the next and previous day of the current comic. Up and Down switches to another comic, space scrolls a comic if its dimensions are not fitting on the screen, esc quits Mirth and Tab loads the next day of the next comic.

The new version which is planned to be released in two months will introduce choice to the user. He can pick the comments that he wants to view from a list which is definitely a welcome feature to avoid comics that you do not want to view in Mirth.

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.