Boom! Thwack! Comic Reader is yet another, well, comic reader for the iPad and, despite the almost catatonic lack of effort in giving it a name, it is very polished for an early release. It also has one neat–and possibly unique–feature: RSS.
Like every other reader, Comic Reader (henceforth known as CR to avoid confusion) allows you to import CBR, CBZ, ZIP and RAR files of your comic books, and catalog and view them on the iPad.
The catalog view is configurable three ways. There are small and large list views, along with a Series view (which groups series together and shows them with lovely large cover thumbnails), and a customizable "Reading List" view, which lets you gather issues together in arbitrary groups. These work fine, and adding comics is as easy as tapping their titles in a list.
Reading is competent. The page turns can be triggered by swiping or by tapping at the very sides of the screen. These side zones can't be resized (I'd prefer them a touch bigger) and in order to have the right margin take you to the next page, you'll need to (oddly) check "Swap Side Buttons" in the preferences. And no, I don't have the page-reversing Manga Mode enabled.
There is a rather nice thumbnail view for navigating between pages, and the page turn animations are way better than those of the category leader Comic Zeal. But you also miss some CZ features, like the auto-tracking which will scroll a page a section at a time when you tap the "next" button.
Finally, there's the RSS reader, which lets you add any feed you like. There are a few comic books news sites pre-loaded, but you can add in more by typing in the feed address. The reader shows summaries, and you can click through to a web view. This could be used to read web-comics, although it's not really suited for that.
You should probably take a look at the instructions and videos on the developer's site to see if you like it, but CR is a competent reader with a good amount of polish. It cost just $4.
Comic Reader product page [iTunes]
Comic Reader for iPad [Obsidian]
