The Books of Magic isn’t a comic series that many would include in their Top 10 lists, or Top 50 for that matter. After Vertigo decided to reimagine Neil Gaiman’s work as Hunter: The Age of Magic, I all but turned my back on the comic. The original issues however have a firm grip on my heart, a part of me that’s been held hostage by childhood nostalgia too many times to count. I have not only collected all 75 issues of the comic, but I’ve purchased the original miniseries no less than four times. Four times!

Francis Bonnin has added a new way for me to read The Books of Magic with his homebrew application, Comic Book DS. After spending just a few minutes with the new program, I was thumbing through the pages of my favorite issues using the Nintendo DS’ touch screen. Read on for my impressions and photos of Comic Book DS in action.

Note: We urge you to obtain your digital comics LEGALLY. You can download copyright free comics at sites like Golden Age Comics and Homebrew Cast.

Getting these comic books onto your DS is relatively easy, provided that these three items are available to you:

Francis’ PictoDS Program
A Windows PC (multi-platform support is planned)
A homebrew-capable Nintendo DS system

No installation is required after unzipping the PictoDS program. Once you have PictoDS open, you can navigate to a “comic book file” (CBR, CBZ, or other formats listed on the Comic Book DS site), or a folder containing the scanned comic book images that you wish to convert. You can add several items at a time, and Comic Book DS will transmute them into a format your Nintendo DS can display. If you wish, you could use the program to convert regular images and use your DS as a photo-viewer or manual slide-show. The program plays the classic 1UP sound once the process is complete.

The converted comic book files load within seconds on your DS’ screens. You can choose to view the images normally, or hold the DS sideways, book-style. Hitting the R-button switches between the two views, allowing you to test them out and see which view works best for you.

The display will default to Thumbnail mode. A gallery of thumbnailed pages will appear on the touchscreen, allowing you to tap the page you want to read on the other screen. In Overview mode, the full page will appear on the touchscreen along with a movable box. Much like with Opera’s DS application, the image inside the box will appear on the opposite screen. Using the third and final option, Dual Screen mode, the zoomed-in image will span over both screens.

You can pan through the zoomed-in page using the touchscreen or D-Pad. Switching between the three modes is also easily accomplished by pushing the L-Button. If button-based methods don’t fit your fancy, an invisible UI appears whenever you tap one of the touchscreen’s corners. Hitting the icons, you can jump through these modes or move to the next/previous pages.

Actually reading the comic on my DS was a pleasent experience. With all of the display options, I had little-to-no trouble finding one that suited me. Everything worked as advertised, and I was enjoying an issue of The Books of Magic on my DS in no time. As expected, there’s a loss in “the experience,” due to the 256×192 resolution. Using anything that wasn’t the Dual Screen mode did not show enough of the page for me. Despite the limited screen space, text was legible, and the images appeared just as nicely as on the original pages.

There were a few technical issues that appeared after I jabbed the comic book files into revealing them. Many are already listed and discussed on the Comic Book DS site, but I am listing the ones I encountered here anyway for your attention:

If the source file is quite big (or if the folder contains a lot of files) the converted .nds file may be bigger than 32 Mb and then may not be loaded by your DS. A future version of the converter will automatically create multiple files. Until then, you will have to manually reduce the source files (by splitting the files into different folders).

The V1.0 has a bug if your installation directory contains spaces (e.g. your windows desktop). Converting .cbr and .rar files might then create some incorrect 448 kb files.

Pushing the Select button is supposed to change the brightness of your screens, but it froze up my DS instead, requiring a restart! If this feature eventually ends up working though, it would be fantastic.

There is no easy way to switch between issues of comics. You will need to restart, if you wish to read through another one.

I talked with Francis, and many of those problems are already being looked into for the next release. It will be exciting to see where he takes the program, as Comic Book DS is still in its v1.0 infancy. Even if the DS’ cramped screens hold the program back from being the digital solution to carrying around your funny pages, it’s great to see that someone is trying to make it exactly that anyway.

Having to overcome the DS’ homebrew barrier just to test it out will probably turn away many interested users, but I don’t see any other company that would risk putting out a similarly-polished product just so I could read long-forgotten issues of The Books of Magic.

Comic Book DS