Best Comic Reader App for Android
Reading comics, especially on tablets, is a delightful use of bright, vibrant touch screens . If you are an avid reader and want to bring your own files, Astonishing Comic Reader is a relative newbie with a ton of cool features.
Amazing comic reader
Platform: Android Price: Free download page
Functions
- Visual library with cover sketches
- Track read and unread
- Import from Dropbox
- Page thumbnails for easy navigation back and forth
- Create collections to group related comics together
- Add tags to comics for easy search
- Take and save snapshots of your favorite pages
- Options for navigation with gestures, on-screen buttons, or volume buttons
Where is it best
Astonishing Comic Reader is a relative newbie that has one of the nicest interfaces we’ve seen in a comic book app, by a fairly wide margin. Besides the great looks, you can import comics from Dropbox, which means you never have to mess with USB cables or anything else.
On top of that, it adds a lot of organizational features that some other apps don’t. You can create custom collections of related apps for easy sorting, tag collections so you can easily search them, and even mark individual comics as your favorites. You can also take snapshots of the panels or pages you like to save for later.
You can also set the reader to night mode to reduce glare when reading at night. You can also navigate pages by touching the sides of the screen, pressing on-screen buttons, or using the volume buttons to move forward and backward. There’s even support for displaying your comics on Chromecast.
Where it fails
This whole organization is great, but one of the best features seems to be completely broken. The app’s description states that it can sync your collections, favorites, and reading stats, but in my experience, only the latter worked completely. While this might work with some changes, it is not as smooth as you might expect. It also doesn’t sync your comics themselves, but if you’re using Dropbox it hardly matters.
Competition
The last time we looked at it, we chose Comic Rack for its great reading features and the ability to sync to your $ 8 desktop. The second place went to Komik , which offered the same library support for Astonishing, although it did not have the ability to sync. Both are great if you want a little more control over your reading.
Also, they ignore the available digital comic book stores. Comics (from comiXology) is an extensive, universal app that lets you buy and read comics from DC, Marvel, and a number of other publishers. Certain DC and Marvel versions of the app are also available for fans and girls alike, although you can access both collections in the main Comics app. This trio of apps offers fantastic reading experiences, but you can’t bring your own files, which is a huge disadvantage for fans. If you don’t already have your own collection, this can be a great way to get started. In addition, they regularly have quite large sales.
Honorable mentions also deserve A Comic Viewer and Perfect Viewer . These two are not as functional or as pretty as ComicRack or Komik, but they are pretty basic and support a much wider range of formats.