CBL Manager

A ComicRack Community Edition plugin for building, importing, and exporting comic reading lists (.cbl format) — including auto-generating a correctly-ordered list from a story arc or crossover event, matched against the books you actually own.

Features

• Create a reading list from your library — search/filter, multi-select, reorder, save.
• Create a reading list from a story arc — search a story arc or event by name, pull its issues in the correct reading order, and auto-match them against your library. Shows a cover + synopsis overview with an owned/missing completion breakdown.
• Missing issues get real placeholders — instead of just reporting what you don't own, missing issues are added to the library as fileless entries with real cover art, sitting in the correct reading position until you actually add the file.
• A live cover + synopsis panel — select any arc-linked list in ComicRack's own sidebar and a strip showing its cover art and synopsis appears above the book grid, Omnibus-style. Updates automatically on refresh; no extra step needed.
• Refresh an arc-linked list — re-scan it against your library any time (e.g. after adding new books). Reuses existing placeholders for issues still missing and removes ones a real copy has since replaced.
• Export / Import — read and write standard .cbl files, using ComicRack's own native fuzzy-matching for imports.

All commands live under File → Automation; the two arc commands also get a toolbar button.

Story arc sources

Source	Notes
ComicVine	Requires a free API key.
Metron	Requires a free account (username/password).
Comic Book Reading Orders	Covers major cross-title events.
ReadingOrders.com	Smaller, newer catalog.

Pick a source from the dropdown when searching for a story arc — credentials, where needed, are requested once and stored locally.

Installation

1. Download the latest CBLManager.crplugin from Releases (or build it yourself — see below).
2. Extract it into its own folder under ComicRack CE's Scripts directory: %AppData%\cYo\ComicRack Community Edition\Scripts\CBL Manager\
3. Restart ComicRack CE. The commands appear under File → Automation.

Building from source

Requires Visual Studio 2022 (or the standalone Build Tools) with the ".NET desktop development" workload, and a local ComicRack CE install (the project references its assemblies directly).

& "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe" src\CBLManager\CBLManager.csproj -t:rebuild -p:Configuration=Release

Then zip src\CBLManager\bin\Release\CBLManager.dll together with everything in Python\ (Python.py, Package.ini, and the two icon .png files) and rename the .zip to .crplugin. Extract it into the Scripts folder as described above to install.

If your ComicRack install lives somewhere other than the default C:\Program Files\ComicRack Community Edition\, pass -p:ComicRackInstallDir="D:\Other\Path\".

Development notes

docs/action-plan.md and docs/api-notes.md track the project's implementation plan and technical findings, for anyone extending the plugin — adding a new story arc source, for example, just means implementing IReadingListSource.