View Comics with Comix
Pow! Bam! Keraanng! Read your digital comics with Comix!
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
Quick, answer these trivia questions: What was the title of the comic book that saw the first appearance of Spider-Man? In a twist, who turned out to be the secret villain in the Identity Crisis series? Finally, name all seven of The Endless from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series.
If you could answer those questions, you, my friend, are a comic book nerd. But don’t get the wrong idea! Comic book nerds are just as cool as Linux nerds. And if you’re a Linux- and comic book-lovin’ nerd[ such as yours truly —Martin], check out Comix, a GNOME application that makes reading digital editions of comic books on your Linux box fun and easy.
Digitally-distributed comic books usually consist of a series of JPEG or PNG files that have been compressed into archives that end in .cbz,.cbr, or .cbt. cbz files use the zip compression algorithm, cbr files use RAR, and cbt files use tar and either gzip or bzip2. You could just unzip the archives and view the graphic files with Kuickshow, gThumb, or your favorite image viewer, but that’s not much fun, and it wastes a lot of hard disk space. With Comix, a program dedicated to comic book viewing, reading comics onscreen is about as easy as standing next to the racks with book in hand.
