Today Joey Manley announces that “the Modern Tales family of websites (Modern Tales, GirlAMatic, serializer and Graphic Smash) is the first major webcomics network to embrace the downloadable CBR format for full-length, high-resolution digital comic books.”

He says, “CBR format has rapidly become the preferred means of digital comics delivery for people who mostly like to read comic books or graphic novels when they read comics in print … Like MP3 files, CBR’s first gained prominence in the file-sharing world. … CBR format is, far and away, the very best way I’ve discovered to read ‘longform’ comics in digital form.”

First you’ll need some Comic Book Reader software, such as CDisplay (for Windows), FFView (for Macintosh), Qcomicbook (Linux/KDE) or cbrpager (Linux/Gnome).

Once you’ve downloaded one of the software packages linked above, here are the launch CBR’s from the Modern Tales family:

From Modern Tales proper:

Headsmen (Rogues of Clwyd Rhan one-shot) by Reinder Djikhuis

Hotel Fred Vol2 #1 by Roger Langridge

Ballad of Little Monster by Herve Largeaud

Wahoo Morris (Free Comic Book Day issue) by Craig Taillefer

From GirlAMatic:

Galaxion # 1 by Tara Tallen

From serializer:

Make Love the Fetus-X Way by Eric Millikin

From Graphic Smash:

Charity Begins in Hell (Reckless Life) by Tim Demeter

For more, see Joey’s post at Talk About Comics.