Kapowarr - The arr Comic Manager You've been Waiting For

Kapowarr brings us the connection that's missing between reading your favorite comics online to owning them and collecting them to save for later. I've written about the popular Komga app that can serve up your comics and it pairs very nicely with Kapowarr.

If you are familiar with Sonarr or Radarr then the Kapowarr learning curve should be fairly easy for you. There are a few small things that are different that I will go over.

How does Kapowarr Work?

Kapowarr comes packaged into a Docker image that can easily be spun up pretty much anywhere.

Kapowarr first needs a directory to store comics. This can be applied in the settings under "Media Management". Under "Root Folders" you have to add /content which is what the Docker image maps to your comic storage.

Then you need to apply a free Comic Vine API key.

Kapowarr searches and scrapes links on a website known as Get Comics (I suggest using an ad blocker before clicking on the link) to scan and find complete volumes or single issues. Currently, Get Comics is the only source for comics within Kapowarr. Eventually, plans are to implement Usenet to allow users to connect their favorite servers for other sources. Oh! and in case you are wondering, the owner of the Get Comics website is well aware of Kapowarr and loves the idea!

My favorite part about Kapowarr and all of the arr suit of apps is the ability to customize the file structure at the click of a button.

As it sits right now, there is no way to do it all in one go but only per volume. I think maybe soon that will be added in though.

Viewing volumes lets you see all of the issues obtained or missing. And by clicking on a issue you can see the info. As long as Comic Vine has information about the issue, you can see it here too.

Kapowarr supports automatic and manual searching for issues. I find manual seems to work better right now but Kapowarr still does 90% of the leg work you would do otherwise downloading all of these outside of the app.

Kapowarr will download the files to the folder specified in the "File Naming" section, rename them and get your collection more organized than ever before.

It's important to note that Kapowarr scrapes all the links on the Get Comics page when you run a search. If it finds a link that works, it will begin the download process which you can see on the "Activity" page under "Queue"

There is one other page I can't forget to mention because I think it's important to show that you can donate to the owner of Get Comics and the creator of Kapowarr.

This can be found on the "System" page under "Status" where you will also find links to the docs, Kapowarr Discord server and you can report any issues you find with the app.

Final Notes and Thoughts

I never knew how many comic series there were until I started testing Kapowarr. Cas is the dev behind the app and I have been working with him and brutally testing Kapowarr for several weeks now.

Watching this app grow into what it is today is truly awesome. It's not completely bug free yet, but Cas has been squashing bugs left and right that I have been sending his way.

I know many of you will be eager to try it out and wondering how you can get your hands on it. Keep your eyes peeled on Kapowarr Discord or check out the Kapowarr Github repo. Be sure to drop a star!