We’ve talked here before about the various tools out there for reading digital comics. Still, the most diehard collectors usually have such copious amounts of “paper” stashed all over the place that they forget what’s in those shoeboxes brimming with stapled leaves of comics. Sufferers of comic Diogenes syndrome will be gleeful about tools like Whakoom, a multiplatform service to organize your comics collection and give you detailed info about each issue.
Whakoom was born at the end of 2013 as an attempt to restore the rightful place of comics at the cultural vanguard. The fact that kids go en masse to see superhero movies these days and then never look at the original source is a shame that must be rectified. This, and the fact that no other software does the task of collection organizing so well, makes this a gem of a project for any comic fiend with a few years of collecting behind them. While till now Whakoom was only available through the website, just a few days ago it released its official Android app.
The idea behind Whakoom is to serve as the organizational nucleus for your comics, in terms of both cataloguing and rating the ones you’ve got and finding the ones you want. The Whakoom community is key here, as it provides ratings and commentary for the new publications. You can even check out individual users’ profiles to see their collected titles, favorites, and wishlists – because we all know gifting comics is AWESOME.
In terms of your own library, as you add content it automatically gets organized into collections, so if for example you include your 240 stapled copies of The Amazing Spiderman, they’ll all get added to one subfolder that displays both the total number in the series and how many issues you have. The cool thing here is that you can separate the ones you want to get and in certain cases Whakoom will even tell you if it’s available on one of the associated online stores, though at the moment this feature is still a bit green.
All this info gets remotely scraped from public sources – beyond the covers you’ll find the issue number, related authors, and other Whakoom users who have it, too. Plus you can see whose collections it’s been added to. That special JLA/Avengers issue you love so much might belong to somebody’s DC/Marvel Crossovers” list that somebody’s created, so the platform could also serve as an interesting way to discover new content.
Whakoom is a completely free service, though you can pay for the Pro version in a monthly subscription to get cool features like an option to add entire collections at once, tick issues on your to-read list, and locally download your collection data, among many other extras (check them all out here). The subscription works out to 20 euros a year – which should be highly tempting for comics fans who want to get all they can out of their hardcopy collection in this fateful era of the digital gobbling up all things material. Nothing like the smell of page glue and the joy of propping up a comic on your belly before dropping off to sleep at night.
More info | Official Whakoom site
