ComicZeal Review: the Best and Most Flexible iPhone Comic Book App

The iPhone comic book reader mystery has been solved!

There is finally an easy and enjoyable way to read (and convert) all your digital comic books on the iPhone and iPod Touch…and its name is ComicZeal.

I have been using ComicZeal since the first day it was released (thanks again to reader Maddux for the tip), and I have been thrilled with its performance. ComicZeal is fast and smooth and the most flexible solution yet for reading ANY comic book on the iPhone or iPod Touch. By the way, I have no affiliation with the developers, and I get no commissions or freebies for writing this review!

The most important features of ComicZeal are:

Comics are downloaded to your iPhone so you can read them offline anytime.The comic images are big enough to see all the text and details, and they smoothly scroll –almost glide– across your iPhone screen.Comics can be resized quickly and easily using the standard pinch technique.

Comics can be read portrait or landscape mode…but landscape mode only works when the iPhone is tilted to the left (the top of the iPhone facing left). Not sure why, but it’s good to know.

You can turn pages easily by tapping a button on the bottom of the screen.

ComicZeal remembers your place! If your in the middle of reading a comic, and you turn the iPhone off, when you come back to the app it will resume where you left off.

For me, the most critical point is that ComicZeal has made a converter that will let me take ALL my old comic files and quickly convert them to ComicZeal’s format.

Why doesn’t ComicZeal just read .cbr and .cbz files? Well, they answer this one on their website:

“A [.cbr file] is way too large for the iPhone. Each page is roughly three times the size of the maximum image that the iPhone can easily display (1024×1024 pixels). If the large images are used on the iPhone, they must be broken into smaller pieces and shown to the user as they scroll through the page. This takes up a lot of processor time. Processor=battery so the battery life suffers.”

I have converted a couple of comics from my collection, and they look fantastic! The converter software is a separate (free) application that runs on your desktop. I will go into the details of using the ComicZeal Creator software in a future post, but there’s not much to it. Nice and simple!

How do you get the converted files to your iPhone? You can either use your own wireless network to download them from your own computer, or you can do what I did and upload them to your own webspace, and then download them off your own website to your iPhone. Anybody can do this, and it allows everybody to share their own iPhone comic downloads! Take a look at the simple and dinky website I just put up today for this very purpose: http://iPhoneComicBox.com

August 13, 2009 UPDATE! ComicZeal has lowered their price!

The ComicZeal reader app is available on the iTunes App Store for only $4.99

The ComicZeal Creator software is available for Mac and Windows. It is still in beta, but all I had to do to get the software was email the developer and ask for it. If you have any question or comments about ComicZeal or any other iPhone comic book apps, please leave a comment!