myComics

Developer: Aquafadas
Category: Books
Version: 1.3.1
Release Date: May 27, 2009
Size: 4.4 MB
Price: $3.99
Rating 6/10

Like most of you, I have begun to transfer most of my digital life to my iPhone. After the obvious -- email, video, web browsing -- came the not-so-obvious, like banking, timekeeping, gaming, and reading. But comics -- that seems hard, right? I mean, television scales to the iPhone, and books do surprisingly well, but comics are not scalable.  So when myComics came out, promising a full digital comic reader for the iPhone, I was filled with skepticism and curiosity.

And I was right to have both. myComics is a well-designed app that looks a lot like other bookshelf apps, but focuses exclusively on digital comic book content, including PDF, CBR, CBZ and ZIP files. You can't download them from a central store, like you can on Stanza or Kindle for iPhone, but instead transfer them from your computer to the iPhone using a web browser or a dedicated (free) desktop app called Jivaro. Jivaro is preferred, because it condenses your comics into an optimized iPhone format that's more easily transferred. Once on the iPhone, you can rate them for easy viewing. So uploading and organizing your comics is pretty well done.

As for the actual reading...you cannot fault the developer for this, but reading comics on your iPhone is not an optimal experience. Full-page view is really too small to let you know what's going on, so you have to zoom and scroll through the whole comic. This is okay at best, tedious at worst, and occasionally ruins the entire comic-reading experience. On the one hand, it forces you to go panel-by-panel, for those of us with the bad habit of skipping ahead. But on the other, it forces you to go panel by panel, breaking up the flow of the story and wreaking havoc on the pages that don't feature strict chronological, left-to-right reading. It's good to catch up on your reading, but it's hard to fully enjoy.

So kudos to the implementation of myComics, but the jury is out on whether you should use this app to actually read comics. If you're a hard-core digital comic book reader, you might be interested in this. But then again, if you're a hard-core digital comic book reader, you might want to wait until you can fetch your laptop so you can enjoy it the way it's meant to be read