Comics are just kids’stuff, right?

Wow, I’m tired. But I’m really wired too. You know, how you feel when you’ve been up for three days on a speed binge and have ground your teeth down to stumps (not that I know how it feels to be up for three days on a speed binge, I feel a bit too old for such antics nowadays).

No, my drug of choice has been comics. Back in the mid-to-late nineties I was well keen on comics, and I’ve been reliving that enthusiasm by reading comics on my computer. I don’t mean internet comics like Beaver and Steve – I’m talking about the real thing, like what I used to go to the comics store to buy, only now they’ve been digitized and are available for download in .cbr format files. You can read .cbr files in any .pdf reader, but my chosen weapon is Comix, whose creators describe it as

a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It reads images in ZIP, RAR or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files. It is written in Python and uses GTK+ through the PyGTK bindings.

If you use Ubuntu, it’s in the repositories. I’m sure you can find it for other OSes too; just go looky at that link (here it is again, if you missed it).

I used to read Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson (and Rodney Ramos on inks) but sadly stopped buying comics before the title’s 5 year run was over. So, I downloaded the entire run of the comic and have been reading it straight through.

I’m also a big fan of Hellblazer, on which that Keanu Reeves movie Constantine was based (incidentally, that film did not do the comic any justice at all). So, I downloaded a huge bunch of Hellblazer .cbr files and binged on them too. I also downloaded V For Vendetta, the Watchmen mini-series (on which the film of the same name was based), and I’ve started a new (to me) title, the first volume of The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell.

So, where did I find this veritable trove of comic book treasures? All I’ll say is Filestube.com. Brilliant site. Check it out.

Now, how many more issues of The Invisibles can I read before I lapse into a coma and die?

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