ComicZeal review

Andrew Williams

We review ComicZeal, an impressive comic book reader for your iPhone

Published on Sep 3, 2009

Comic book fans should look upon the iPod Touch and iPhone as an electronic boon.

Although admittedly thumbing a touchscreen isn’t going to replace the feel of pages between your fingers, the high quality screen of these two devices makes them near-perfectly suited for a bit of reading on the go, especially when the latest on-the-go reading devices like the Kindle and Sony e-book reader don’t have colour screens.

Although there’s a selection of comic book file readers available on the App Store, ComicZeal labels itself as a higher class of software solution, designed for luxury and well as function.

Whenever you load up a new series of files to the program, it appears within a wooden bookshelf, displaying its first page, complete with a little screwed-on placard below telling you what the file is exactly.

Trite as it may sound, the otherwise fuss-free presentation makes the wood-panelled menu screen thoroughly pleasant. Actually getting the files onto your iPhone is a little more complex than the tasteful presentation may suggest.

Your iPhone needs to be connected to a PC that has the ComicZeal sync program running. Actually getting the files recognised by this program is a simple case of dragging them onto the application’s screen. The program converts all your .cbr and .cbz files to ComicZeal’s native .cbi format.

Once they’ve been processed on your computer, you need to press a sync button on your iPhone as well as your PC. This’ll get the sync process up and running, after which you’ll have your comics sitting happily on your virtual mahogany bookshelf. Unless you spend some time re-labelling your files before synchronisation, from within the ComicZeal app, they won’t feature their proper issue numbers.

Thankfully, ComicZeal redresses the balance when actually looking at the files. The accelerometer turns the pages around in 90-degree increments, although you can turn it off once you’ve got the angle you’re looking for. Navigating between pages is a doddle, just requiring you to drag the screen over to the page’s edge. You can also change pages by clicking a button from a pop-up menu.

Aside from uploading your own files to the device, you can also download rights-free comics directly from within the application. For anyone that’s remotely serious about reading comics on their iPhone, ComicZeal deserves serious consideration and offers a far better experience than freebie comic readers. The sync application could still do with a few tweaks, but otherwise we wholeheartedly recommend it.