On The Cheap: ‘God Hates Astronauts’ And ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Lead The Latest Humble Bundle

Here at ComicsAlliance, we firmly believe that the only thing better than getting cheap comics is getting a lot of cheap comics at one time while also supporting a good cause, so we keep an eye on the Humble Bundle just in case that exact opportunity presents itself. This week, there's a good one, and it's built around a pretty interesting theme; all of the projects were successfully funded on Kickstarter. Plus, some of the proceeds go towards digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and First Book, which provides educational resources for children living in poverty.

The bundle includes both comics and prose novels, and right now, you can snag everything that's on offer for fifteen bucks, including the first volume of Ryan Browne's God Hates Astronauts, Ryan North's choose-your-own-Shakespearean-adventure To Be Or Not To Be, and a whole lot more besides.

If you've never read God Hates Astronauts, it's quite possibly the weirdest superhero story of the decade, largely because it takes the well-worn premise of "what if superheroes were actually kind of terrible people" and spices things up by having the main character's head explode and then get replaced by the spectral severed head of a cow.

Also, there's a character who is legally distinct from Reginald VelJohnson's character from Die Hard and Family Matters who has bear arms. It's pretty great, and after running as a webcomic and successfully being crowdfunded as a paperback, it wound up at Image as an ongoing series. If you've been thinking about jumping on, this is a good place to start.

To Be Or Not To Be, on the other hand, isn't a comic at all, but it's certainly comics-adjacent. There's a pretty good chance that you've got it already --- the crowdfunding campaign was pretty darn successful and we've been recommending it for a while --- but it was written by Ryan North and featuring illustrations from dozens of artists, including Anthony Clark and Noelle Stevenson, and it's a choose-your-own-adventure style version of Hamlet that goes in a whole lot of different directions than the original play.

So different, in fact, that it's possible to change characters, play a smaller choose-your-own-adventure story inside the larger one, and even play a game of chess move-by-move against Queen Gertrude. It's also pretty great.

The comics content in the bundle also includes The Big Feminist But, an anthology edited by Shannon O'Leary and Joan Reilly; the first volume of Michelle Czajkowski's Ava's Demon; the horror anthology The Sleep of Reason, edited by Smut Peddler editor Spike Trotman; Jeff McComsey's Mother Russia; and Greg Pak, Jonathan Coulton and Takeshi Miyazawa's Code Monkey Save World. Plus, you know, some other books that are a little light on the pictures.

The Humble Bundle runs for the next two weeks.