A family member with a fairly extensive comic collection recently discovered files with a .cbr extension, which purportedly contained comics in an electronic format. After a little investigation I found that the CBR extension was listed on the File Extension Source as being associated with CDisplay RAR archived comic book files (see http://www.filext.com/detaillist.php?extdetail=CBR).
The CDisplay program, which can be used to read these files, has a webpage at http://www.geocities.com/davidayton/CDisplay. The program reads files that contain collections of comic book pages in JPEG, PNG, and static GIF formats. It can read images stored in zip, rar, ace, or tar archives without needing to extract the image files from the archive file first. You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard or the space bar to view the pages of the comic sequentially.
The software is free and can be downloaded from http://cdisplay.techknight.com/setup.zip via a link from the developer's website. The author provides the following files from the http://cdisplay.techknight.com/ website:
-
CDisplay Comic Reader
-
CDisplay Comic Reader with Subtitles
Version which can be used for subtitles with the idea that translations for other languages can be provided. This version is a work in progress, so shouldn't be presumed to be bug free. - Example Comic Pages
-
CDisplay Debug Kit
Debugging tool that allows the capture of CDisplay diagnostic information which can be sent to the CDisplay author to assist in the resolution of any problems encountered with the software. This tool doesn't work on Windows 95, 98, nor ME, only on later versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems.