So for quite sometime I have been using icomix for reading my archived comic books. It does a good job of displaying comic books and allowing you to navigate through them. It’s a fairly bare bones app, but for what it is intended for, it works just fine.
There were a few things that I really wished it had, things like searching because looking for comics when your ipad is as loaded as mine is can be fairly difficult. In terms of sorting comics, you’d have to either manually do it, or rename all the files to match exactly followed by a numeric sequence prior to transferring them to the app. For me, this app was just good enough and did the job.
That all changed once I decided to try out Chunky comic reader. I was curious to see how this other app compared to my go to app, and it was a game changer. But first, comixology.
Up until recently, the comixology app was my favorite one for reading comics. Granted, I’ve never tried marvel unlimited, or dc’s app, in fairness to them. I went straight to comixology because they have more diversity in their comic selection. Their app allows you to read them on your ipad but also on the phone. On the phone, using the panel view is best because otherwise the content is too small.
I recently cancelled my subscription because I felt that they were playing themselves with the “unlimited” feature. What I mean is that you pay for this unlimited option, but it’s not truly unlimited. You’d get maybe a volume or two, then if you want to keep reading, you have to outright buy the comic. That’s deceptive, annoying and very expensive!
So in order to use icomix or chunky reader, you have to have your own archived comic collection. They are just readers and you bring your own material.
One thing that blows but makes sense is that Chunky reader and Icomix can’t do panel view. Beside that though, chunky does everything Icomix does and more. I assume that the panels had to be manually coded and that’s a big process I’m sure.
So chunky handles grouping of file names much better and doesn’t require that you rename all the files in order to know and recognize that they are part of the same sequence. There are other things that I thought were better with chunky, but one of the key points that got me to choose it as my reader was that it has a very good search function. Also, it seems to handle large amounts of files more efficiently.
Icomix didn’t allow you to delete and manage files from the itunes gui, but chunky reader does. I think that hands down, chunky reader takes the win on this one. If you need a standalone comic book reader, I’d highly recommend chunky reader over any other app I’ve seen thus far. Unfortunately for you android people, it’s only available on the apple ecosystem. Fortunately, android has a bunch of comic book apps for you to choose from!
Just a life long New Yorker sharing the journey through my lens. Please take note of a post’s date. The views I express here are subject to change and evolving as I grow and learn.
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