Visual Comic Reader

Visual Comic Reader is a stylish app that puts emphasis on simplicity when it comes to comic books. It gives you the possibility to open files with the .cbz, .cbr and .pdf format and read comicbooks in front of your desktop, laptop or notebook.

Based on the Electron framework and React JavaScript library, the tool gets quickly installed on the PC, thanks to the fact that there are no software requirements involved. Besides Windows, it's compatible with Linux and macOS.

As far as the interface is concerned, Visual Comic Reader lists buttons on a slim, red bar on the bottom side of the main window, which can be used to open comic books via the popup file explorer and view keyboard shortcuts.

What's more, you can go to the previous or exact page, zoom in and out, toggle portrait and landscape mode, as well as view two comic book pages side by side (instead of single continuous mode).

The thumbnails of the comic book pages are shown in a vertical filmstrip on the left side, which can be clicked to jump to any page. While you can click the mouse button to turn it into a pan tool and drag the picture, the scrollwheel doesn't work for zooming in and out.

However, you can use keyboard shortcuts to switch to fullscreen mode (Ctrl+F), open a new comic book file (Ctrl+O), zoom in (Ctrl+Up), zoom out (Ctrl+Down), go to the previous or next page (Left + Right arrows), as well as view the list of shortcuts (Ctrl+S).

The program ran smoothly on Windows 10 in our tests, loading comic book pages fast while remaining light on system resources consumption.

Although it doesn't come bundled with richer options and configuration settings for users interested in more book viewing controls (such as multiple themes for the interface), Visual Comic Reader offers a simple and straightforward solution for reading comic books with the .cbz, .cbr and .pdf filetype.