Collecting comics - modern style

Posted September 28, 2004

frontline-01-a_l.jpgFor those of you that don't know me, let me first explain that I'm a ten year old trapped in a twenty-something's body. I am notorious for having child-like interests, including Lego, GI Joe, Transformers (well actually, any toys from the 80's), Atari and vintage gaming consoles, and comics. Granted, I haven't actually spent money on comics for some time, which is more than can be said about the other addictions hobbies.

With the internet being such a wonderful place, and the abundance of scanned comics, I thought I'd investigate computer-based comic book readers. My laptop has an awesome screen, and is very nice to read off.

Firstly, I visited SuprNova.org as they always have a few links at the bottom to comic books. I was in luck, because they had over two gigabytes of GI Joe comics in a single download! (The following day had 500MB of He-Man comics :) A short while later I'd downloaded the files, and found they were in CBZ format. This is a compressed file format, based around ZIP. CBR is another format, which I believe is based around RAR.

Then I checked Freshmeat, and found a link to Asparagino's Comic Viewer, which is a Java application designed to run on Debian. Great!

I installed the required components (GNOME's Java libraries) and was able to have it running in a few seconds. There's no Java source, it's all precompiled, which makes it easy for newbies.

All in all, I'm very happy with this little application, though I might attempt to build a simple two-page viewer, for further authenticity. Reading the comic one page at a time doesn't seem right, I think you need two pages open at once.

Edit: 28/09/2004 - 3:09PM
CBView is what I now use for CBR files. I love choice.

3 Comments so far

  1. rich on September 28th, 2004

    You just reminded me of this store I saw in Singapore. They had all these transformer toys, like minatures or something. You would have liked it. Plus it was in the hi-tech shopping mall with the massive video screen.

  2. mlambie on September 29th, 2004

    … and all I got was a knock off Battlecat! ;)

  3. James on October 1st, 2004

    I have a whole town/city of lego packed in a box, which also includes a battery operated monorail train made out of lego.

    Lego Rockz0rs.

    I also used to have Gi Joe hovercraft, and that black dude in the comic pic you attached.

    Had quite a few transformers and if anyone remembers the M.A.S.K tv series, I had those too.

    Not that im in a rush to have kids but when I do I’ll be right there along side them playing Lego, and the rest, plus Im older so I can kick there ass just to play with the best toy haha..