A series of random hops over the web left me realising that I had no idea what the cbr file format was. I had been researching e-book formats for a course I am about to begin teaching. I had thought that I had the winners nailed down. They were pdf and epub. Then I found mentions of cbr and cbz, and wondered: “what the hell are they?”

Imagine my surprise and delight when I found that it was another format like epub (that is to say, it was another format that repackaged zip archives as “files”) – and that it was designed to read digitised versions of old comic books. I downloaded a couple of suitable files, momentarily reliving my youth as a collector of Flash comics, and tried several different readers. None of them failed to work, but the best one I have found so far is Comical, which has a minimal interface with a Powerpoint-like ribbon down the left hand side, displaying thumbnails of the pages.

The reasons that I prefer Comical to the others I have tried are that the interface hides very easily, as you can see in the image above, but the controls can still be accessed by right clicking anywhere, or by keyboard shortcuts; and the double page view works properly, and is the default view. Like most of the others it also lets you rotate pages – and a rotated single page view is ideal for viewing comicis on a bus on a netbook.

I shall discuss the morality of viewing old comics in this way after I have read a few…