A comic book, or comic, is a magazine or book containing sequential drawings telling a story. The dialog is accomplished by using balloons pointing to the talker and containing the words. This differs from traditional illustrated text which has the text separated from the drawings. A long comic book is often called a graphic novel.

Comic books are indigenous to the USA and originally began as collections of comic strips that appeared in newspapers. While these comic strips were usually humorous the comic book itself is generally not (despite the name). Instead it is often action packed where the illustration shows and highlights the action.

In electronic form comic books are typically a collection of sequential graphic images stored in a CBR, CBZ or a PDF format which acts as a container. The comic book is related to the Japanese Manga but differs in having longer dialog and color images. A eBook Reader that handles comic books will generally have to zoom in on the images to clearly read the text.

[edit] Problems in displaying Comics

While electronic Comic books work easily on large computer displays there can be problems on mobile devices.

• The displayed text is generally small and thus requires large images which will need to be panned to read.
• Comics are often page oriented or even double page which requires a large image and a viewer that can deal with this large image. This is in contrast to comic strips which are normally panel oriented.
• eBooks in CBR/CBZ format or PDF are relatively large. Graphic novels can be too large to display on some devices.
• Bookmarks and keeping your place in the book is important which precludes using a standard graphic viewer to sequence through the pages.
• Color is heavily used in comic books which makes gray scale readers less suitable.

[edit] For more information

• See graphic readers for software designed to read comic books.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book
• See CBR and CBZ for tools to make comic books in those formats.