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Friday night I headed down to Jim Hanley’s Universe in NYC for the 100th episode of the iFanboy Pick of the Week podcast. The show itself was awesome and was nice to see one of my favorite podcasts live. I didn’t actually talk to anyone there like an ass but it was still good times. The podcast is now up if you would like to listen to it. There is also a good chance it will make the video show where you’ll probably see me standing off to the side. After the show everyone went to Stout down the street but unfortunately I had my underage niece’s with me so we had some sushi in the city then headed home. I did end up picking up New Frontier Vol 1 and 2 and Kingdom Come trades to help feed my current DC fixation with the handy dandy 20% off coupon iFanboy was offering.

Wednesday is my favorite day of the week. I wake up, have some breakfast and wait patiently until 2pm when my Local Comic Shop opens so I can go and pick up this weeks comic books. I recently got back into comics after about 15 years thanks to podcasts like iFanboy and Geekscape but the real unsung hero is my Apple Macbook. Without programs like ComicBookLover, Wednesday’s List and iComicsOnSale, I wouldn’t have really gotten back into reading comics.

ComicBookLover

ComicBookLover aims to be the iTunes for digital comics and it comes pretty close. Its laid out in a similar fashion to iTunes with a 3 pane browser on the top, your library on the bottom and your lists on the left. You can also view by cover art. CBL allows you to organize your entire collection by tagging the file with all the relevant information such as issue name, volume, publisher and year. Just like iTunes, it support Smart Lists. This allows you to make a List based on search criteria which I have found invaluable.

Viewing comics has an impressive feature set such as Single, Western or Manga view. You can rotate images on the screen 90 degrees and it supports dual monitors. What I like to do is rotate the screen and turn my Macbook on its side like a book to read. The 13′ widescreen is almost the perfect size of a comic page. Pages are automatic sized based on which view your using and it provides an On-screen display to navigator when using Full Screen mode.

ComicBookLover will set you back $24.95 but if you read digital comics in any form, its well worth it.

Wednesday’s List

Railhead Design’s Wednesday’s List is a one trick pony. It pulls this weeks Diamond shipping list and allows you to print out your Pull List. The interface divides up each publisher in its own section and lists the name, Previews order number and price. Just check the box next to the comics you want and your ready to save, print or email your list. You can even sync with iCal. My favorite part is you can add in your local tax rate and it gives you a running tally for the comics you selected. I also print and bring my list with me so I know what I’m getting and what its going to cost me.

Wednesday’s List costs $7 and is a Universal Binary.

iComicsOnSale

iComicsOnSale or iCOS is a Dashboard widget. iCOS is similar to Wednesday’s List in that it allows you to print out weekly pull lists. I prefer iCOS because you can view a summary of each comic, cover, price, pages and writer/artist information. They even have a featured comic page highlighting one comic each week. That being said, I don’t use iCOS for two reasons. One its a widget and would work so much better an actually program and two its very unstable for me. It uses an insane amount of memory some times and it eats my pull list. The latest version is still beta so its to be expected but I’ve moved to Wednesday’ List for my Pull Lists because of this.

iComicsOnSale is free and they have just launched a new website which lists this weeks new comics with full descriptions.

iFanboy Podcast

While iFanboy is not an application it is a weekly podcast and video podcast that I can’t live without. And technically I subscribe to both podcasts using iTunes but thats nether here nor there. iFanboy do a audio podcast called the Pick of the Week where they pick one comic for that week and discuss it along with other books that were released. It comes out every Sunday and I listen to it on my way to pick up my comics every Wednesday. Then when I get home, there video podcast is waiting for me. The video podcast differs from the audio as they focus on topics and not weekly books.

So definitely check there podcast out. I look forward to it each week and its always the first I listen to and watch.

Back in the early 90’s I was big into comics like most kids my age. But as I got older and entered high school and all the gimmicks started with Marvel, I pretty much walked away.

And thats how it stayed until about 2002 when I found out Kevin Smith was writing comics such as Green Arrow and Daredevil. This made me start looking at comics again and started getting weekly issues. At this time, I still owned my own business and really didn’t have time to go back and catch up on story lines and actually read weekly comics. But I still kept a pull list for about 3 years. The comics started to add up week after week and I never got around to reading any really. I did a small run of Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-man and tried to pick up X-treme X-men but that was really it. In 2005, I finally canceled my box at my local comic store as I was planning on moving in the next few weeks and was tying up loose ends.

2006 came and I was starting to get back into podcasts thanks to diggnation and Revision3. I happen to catch the Kevin Smith interview on Geekdrome but didn’t really start watching Geekdrome until about episode 39 and feel in love with it. This started me back on a comics somewhat but not until Geekscape and iFanboy recently started did I actually start reading comics.

My “in” was Marvel Civil War. Comics are a little hard to just jump right in but Civil War was a crossover throughout the entire Marvel Universe. I could start at the beginning of a story arc that covered a lot of books so it was a good starting point no matter which title I wanted to read. I spend the last few weeks reading Civil War from the start and all the tie-in books. This was about 80 books altogether and I finally finished last night. Since I was caught up mostly, I started going back a few episodes of iFanboy and posting on there forum. From this I started making notes of what other books are good and I should check out.

Right after watching the first vidcast of iFanboy, I went and ordered Watchmen: Absolute Edition and 300 from Amazon. A few days later I was looking at the Comic Book Finder and found a comic shop in my area called Legends of Superheroes. I tossed the address in my GPS and off I went. I liked the store and they seemed to have a good selection of Trades which my old shop didn’t. I talked to the owner some and I was pretty much hooked again. I picked up The Dark Knight Returns and the first two volumes of The Preacher TPB. As a comic book fan, its embarrassing to admit I have never read any of these but hey, you got to start somewhere.

This Wednesday I went down to Legends, picked up this weeks comics I wanted and started a box. So I’m officially back and can’t wait for next Wednesday!