New iPad Options For Comics Fans

Comic book fans with iPads: You have two new reasons to get excited today.

A new application, Comic Viewer, has just been approved in the App Store. And today?s update of the popular e-reading app Stanza enables it to work on the iPad — and, more importantly, to display comics.

Comic Viewer comes at a reasonable price of $5, compared to the $8 you have to spit out for Comic Zeal, another comic-reading app. Still, that?s five bucks more than you?ll be spending on either the Marvel or Comics apps, which are currently free.

Comic Viewer, developed by the same guys who made the popular Kevin Smith iPhone app, has most of the features found in other comic book readers: The ability to load it up with CBR and CBZ scans, transfer files via iTunes file sharing, and read in landscape mode.

The problem is that the application doesn?t offer anything radically new or better to distinguish it from the competition. It doesn’t have Comic Zeal?s over-the-air syncing ability, or Comics? bubble-by-bubble navigation.

Worse yet, it?s less than polished. You can pinch to zoom in, which makes reading the text easier, but then you can?t scroll or pan around the screen. You have to zoom out if you want to move onto the next image.

It does a solid job of displaying content in landscape mode, unlike Comic Zeal, which mostly fails to recognize double spreads. But you can?t zoom in at all while in landscape mode, making it virtually impossible to use.

A neat feature is an integrated web browser used to download content. That’s much less annoying than, say, the Kindle app, which launches Safari to browse the Amazon store.

So how does Stanza fare? Stanza is a popular e-reading app on the iPhone, and its appearance on the iPad should get us all excited. Just like most document-handling apps, you can use iTunes to transfer your files and load up your comics selection onto it.

Though not primarily a comic book reader, it does a good job of displaying CBR and CBZ files. In fact, it might be the snappiest of all the comics apps out there.

Comic Viewer and Stanza join a growing selection of comics readers on the iPad. Yet there isn?t a clear leader of the pack. Comics and Marvel, built on the same Comixology platform, make digital comics look beautiful, but they suffer from a limited selection and lack of flexibility.

Other readers are far from perfect, with annoying little flaws often hindering the reading experience.

Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the Panelfly app, due to come out this summer.

(Photo: Comic Viewer, Denvog.com)