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If you’re a regular webcomic reader, you probably have a bunch of bookmarks that you hit daily. If you are a dabbler, you might want to explore a few more. Both types of readers might find the new Comic Rocket webcomic viewer a handy way to organize their reading matter. A browser-based platform that aims to be a kind of souped up feed for webcomics, you can mark your favorites and check them all with one click—although it’s in beta, it’s easy enough to navigate, We signed up three of our favorites in no time.

Of course, there is also sharing and social networking attached. However, as the press release notes, nothing is hosted by Comic Rocket—it’s strictly a tool to aggregate your favorite webcomics.

With over 2000 comics in its database, this seems pretty useful. But what say you, power webcomic readers? PR below:

Over 3 million people read a webcomic every week and Comic Rocket aims to be part of that experience. With its new beta reader Comic Rocket makes it easier than ever to find, bookmark, and read webcomics from all genres across the Internet. The Comic Rocket viewer is available now for free to the public on the web at www.comic-rocket.com

“Clearly online comics are much of the medium’s future,” said CEO Tim Shields, “but keeping track of them all shouldn’t be so hard.”

Comic Rocket has over 2,000 webcomics in its database with an amazing diversity and wide range of talent and creativity across hundreds and hundreds of creators. The application also allows you to create a reading list of the comics you choose. Additionally, Comic Rocket has archives so that readers can start at the beginning of a webcomic they’ve discovered even if it’s been around since the year 2000 or before. There’s no more jumping in to the middle of a story and trying to catch up. Even the best RSS reader can only go back a week or two. And Comic Rocket remembers where users leave off bookmarking each strip as they go.

Comic Rocket is not a host site however. Comic Rocket doesn’t scrape the comics from a creator’s site to put them on its own. Instead Comic Rocket uses a sophisticated proprietary search crawler that continuously scans the web and gathers data for the titles in its database. Traffic to the comic is passed straight through to the creator’s site. All information about online comics in the system, such as genre, descriptions, ratings, and more is maintained by users so that anyone can add a new webcomic they’ve discovered or update one that they follow. Users add comics they want to read to their own library as they find them, and when a comic is updated, the system updates the archive to be read at their convenience. 

Shields continues, “It used to be hard to find webcomics to read. A friend would send me a link or I’d hear about something on Facebook but I kept getting overwhelmed with bookmarks. Or I’d get turned off by having to return daily to a site just to get to the one thing I wanted to read. Comic Rocket solves that. I can add a comic, read my fill, and return to that series the next day, the next week, or a month later. And meanwhile I’m reading twenty other comics at my own pace.”

If you’re new to webcomics, Comic Rocket can make suggestions for you or you can browse through a list of popular comics to start adding to your reading list. Users can also share comics and their reading habits across social media like Facebook and Google+. There has never been a better time to read webcomics and there has never been a better way to do it than with Comic Rocket today.

1 COMMENT

  1. Right now, hundreds of webcomic cartoonists are furiously googling how to detect when their site is loaded in an iframe.

    I’m kind of surprised this site ran this story without any mention how cartoonists get downright flippant at ANY mention of content aggregation.

  2. Comic Rocket is VERY sensitive to issue but we are not an aggregator. We’re an index. Traffic passes directly through to the creator’s site unaltered.

    The main beef creators have is when their comic is copied from their site and placed elsewhere (scraping) because they lose the ad revenue. We don’t do that. We do not touch the original site in any way.

    We are working directly with many creators of the webcomics we index so we are aware of the pitfalls and perception issues.

    In fact, we are developing sophisticated analytics tools that will be available to creators later in the year.

  3. @Josh: Comic Rocket is an indexed reader that points to the comics rather than hosting them.

    But we are talking with several hosts about a number of similar exciting things.

  4. Thanks for the link. The site looks promising. It could use some work, but it’s already a lot more convenient than how I’ve been reading webcomics. I might actually be able to keep up with some now. I especially like the idea of having a consistent navigation system, instead of using the sometimes hard to navigate systems some comics use.