I like collecting media. I had a sizeable physical computer game collection which I sold 99% of a year or two ago as all my game purchases are now digital only. I had sizeable CD/DVD/VHS collections, all of which are also gone now replaced by digital alternatives. I still have a decent book collection, not what it once was, but I still like to have physical copies of books. Though there is a caveat there, the majority of my book collection is RPGs which I prefer to have physically because they are something you use. Even if I own a physical copy of a book, I will generally read a digital one. The same goes for comics. What’s the point of this preamble? Just illustrating that I greatly prefer my media in a digital format these days (and that the only thing standing between me and being a hoarder is lack of space).
So needless to say, I have a sizeable digital comics collection. It is smaller than it used to be due to three main things, hard drive failure, a new PC and being more discerning with what I buy and keep. But it is still far too unwieldy to just plonk into a “Comics stuff” folder and read whenever I want to take my chances or search for something I half remember having. Despite the massive growth of digital comics there are surprisingly few organisational programs available for it. This may be due in part to a lot of digital comics only being available via publishers “walled gardens” e.g. Marvel Unlimited or DC Universe Infinite or major digital comics retailers that have become more restrictive e.g. Comixology after it was purchased by Amazon. As an aside, I’ve nothing against those apps. They are fairly decent. I just prefer to go DRM free and avoid subscription services when I can. But there are still a sizeable number of digital comics available DRM free often in CBR or CBZ (which are just renamed RAR and ZIP files).
It may seem like a low bar as there isn’t much competition but Comicrack is the premier, and in my opinion, the only worthwhile comic organiser. It has (like a lot of comics software as we’ll see later) sadly being abandoned by its creator for years but the community has stepped up and an open source “Community Edition” is now available. The program is extensible via its robust scripting options and I’d consider some of those community created scripts essential. You can do a lot with Comicrack and I may delve into my exact scripts and workflow with it in another post. But to summarise, no matter the format or source of a digital comic it goes in one end of Comicrack and comes out the other end in a CBZ file with the comics metadata embedded with a standardised filename and sorted into a specific directory based on naming and folder rules I set.
What comes next? Obviously collecting more comics!…..or I suppose if you want to be gauche you read the comics. I read comics pre-dominantly on a Windows PC and Apple iPad. When it comes to comic reading software there is again not a huge range of choices and most offer similar features so which you want to use will often come down to personal preference (generally which implementation of which scaler you prefer) or specific use cases. Comicrack does have a built-in comic reader. I greatly dislike it and never use it for anything other than checking things quickly. No matter what way I configure it it chugs along and the scrolling is jerky and jarring. I prefer very minimalist comic readers; I don’t want to see a UI at all. You may also want to change the program based on what you’re reading e.g. some work better with webcomic archives than others.
On PC my longtime favourite was CDisplay. It had no UI, nice QOL features that made moving from one volume to the next seamless and had good customisable mouse controls. Sadly, it’s author passed away and it stopped getting updated and didn’t support newer versions of file formats such as JPEG or PNG which made it obsolete. After that I tried various other options. I used MMCE and MangaMeeya for reading scanlations as they have excellent upscaling options and work really well with manga and Korean and Chinese webcomics. But both are unfinished and buggy. They aren’t particularly intuitive to use and have patchy image format support. I also moved away from reading scanlations in favour of official English translations which primarily come in volumes and reading webcomics via the English publishers apps or websites e.g. Tapas or Line Webtoon.
After trying a few other options, I ended up using CDisplayEX as my default Windows comic reader. Leaving aside the fact it rather distastefully cashing in on its predecessor’s name recognition it’s a fairly competent recreation of CDisplay with more up to date image format support. I hadn’t been impressed with earlier versions but it did improve and now I use it for both manga and American comics. The other popular options are YACReader, GonVisor and Cover.
YACReader is very comparable to CDisplayEX in terms of reading experience and performance. However, you can’t make it open fullscreen by default which I find annoying and it doesn’t seem to be as customisable. YACReader also comes with YACLibrary which is very basic library software, it also lets you share your collection across multiple devices. As I already have alternate solutions for both of those, I don’t find it useful. Cover isn’t really free; the free version is basically a trial version. It has a nice interface but you can’t use the scroll wheel to move between pages (or at least I couldn’t find it in options) so it was a non-starter for me. GonVisor is similar to YACReader and CDisplayEX though I would give it a slight edge in picture clarity. Though maybe alt-tabbing between them all just made my eyes go funny. It’s quite customisable even if the UI feels clunky and old. You can also set it to open in full screen which is, to repeat myself, critical for me. I am toying with switching from CDisplayEx to GonVisor but haven’t made the switch yet. One note is that none of the comic reader apps I’ve tried seem to handle continuous vertical scrolling in a manner I’m happy with.
You can also go with creating your own comic book server and serve up your comic collection in the same way Kodi and Plex serve up other media. The advantages of this approach are that it allows you to mirror your reading progress across multiple devices, you don’t need to deal with file transfers so your whole collection is always available no matter your location or your devices operating system. The downsides are you need the system resources or hosting to run your server and you are reliant upon its reader interface (usually web based) though some do tie into other comic reading software. Some popular options for this are Kavita, Komga, Ubooquity, Mango and Suwayomi. The first two are the most popular in my experience. Several of these also offer ODPS support so they will serve ebooks and integrate with ebook reader software and (some) ebook devices. Which may appeal to some (I just generally slap all my ebooks onto my kindle and leave it at that).
I tried Ubooquity but I can’t recommend it, it was extremely clunky. Maybe the updates have improved it but the initial experience really put me off it. I’ve used Komga extensively. I find it pretty good. The web based reader works fine. Nothing amazing but not terrible, basically “just like all the rest”. One of its key features is that it can import Comicrack Reading Lists (as can Kavita). Reading lists are an excellent tool when it comes to American comics, particularly events, for example Marvel’s Civil War event involves 134 different comics across multiple titles so it is great to make a reading list of that, import it into Komga and track your progress wherever you’re reading it. You can make your own reading lists or you can use community created reading lists available from sources such as Comic Book Reading Orders.
I’ve started testing out Kavita recently and it does have some cool features such as send to device and more robust stats but nothing super compelling so far (but in fairness I haven’t tested it extensively). It apparently works better for chapter based reading when it comes to manga. But that isn’t a useful use case for me. Both integrate with Paperback and Tachiyomi (and it’s replacement Mihon). There’s also the fact that Komga’s folder structure already matches the one I use and prefer so while I think Kavita is a solid alternative I feel it’s not for me.
That covers how I read digital comics on desktop. But how do I read them on other devices? Well, the short answer when it comes to Android is that I don’t. I have zero interest in reading comics on my phone (a device which I rarely use for any purpose if I’m honest). I do however like reading them on the iPad where there are several options available e.g. the aforementioned Paperback, YACReader, Panels, etc. I’ve tried a lot of them and the best (by far) is Chunky. It’s fast, has a minimal interface, displays everything, has multiple intuitive sorting options based on metadata fields and if you get the paid version (which you should its only 4 quid) can connect to basically everything from Google Drive to SMB drives (this being quite important to me). The only downside is it’s not clear if the developer is very hands off or has abandoned it so I do worry a future iOS update may kill it.
So, there you go, that’s an overview of how I organise and read my digital comics. To summarise it, the comics are imported to ComicRack’s library where they are converted, have their metadata scraped, renamed and sorted. I then read them using either CDisplayEX on Windows, Chunky Comic Reader on iOS or serve them across my network using a self-hosted Komga server.