It may come as a shock and surprise but I was a pretty big comic book geek back in the day. So, I was pretty excited to find out that fans have been digitizing their comics books into the .cbr and .cbz comic book archive formats. These are just .rar or .zip files containing the scanned pages and the file format renamed. I’ve been using Comical as my comic book reader on the PC (Open Source and available for Mac and Linux as well) and Android Comic Viewer for Android.
Just for the record: I do not endorse posting or downloading comics that are available for sale. That said, I do think that the digital format is a great way to preserve rare comics and share comics that are not commercially available.
Take for instance Preventative Maintenance Monthly #592 from March, 2002. It is an official monthly comic book published by the US Army for the troops. I had never heard of it before so I was delighted when someone provided me with the scanned issue. It has information, humor, letters, and a short (what looks like non-Marvel authorized) Spider-Man story. The original scans I received were the unstapled pages in one big image. I chopped them up and put them in the right order. I am posting the original scans (as a .zip) and my reworking (as a .zip and as a .cbr). If anyone knows more about this comic or where I can find more please contact me, I find this sort of military history fascinating.
Preventative Maintenance Monthly #592
.cbz .zip original scans
