Humble Bundle

I've been keeping my eye on the Humble Bundle for a long time now to find good deals on cheap comics, and one of the things that still surprises me every time there's a new one is that there's always something brand new in there. Take, for instance, the current bundle, which focuses on creator-owned comics from Image. Not only does it have Image mainstays like Invincible, Phonogram, and Saga, but it also includes the first volume of Chip Zdarsky and Kagan McLeod's Kaptara, collecting the first five issues of the series. Folks. Kaptara vol. 1 came out less than a month ago. #6 isn't even out yet. So on the off chance that you need an economic justification to get a whole bunch of comic books and support the Human Rights Campaign, just imagine that you're paying full price for Kaptara, Bitch Planet, and Just The Tips, and getting 47 issues of Invincible for free.

If you like stories of paranoid mysteries and giving money to charity, good news: apparently someone in a position of power read your mind. Not literally. We were joking. Please take the tinfoil off your head. Humble Bundle has teamed up with IDW Publishing for their latest charity bundle featuring various X-Files comics, in advance of the hotly anticipated revival of the classic television series about a familiar pair of FBI agents investigating cases they’re not really supposed to solve, about things that shouldn’t exist.

Seeing Army of Darkness when I was ten years old is one of those things that I genuinely consider to be a life-changing moment. The combination of horror, action and slapstick comedy stuck with me to the point where it pretty much became exactly what I wanted out of all three of those genres ---- and that ending, with the Deadites coming back to attack Ash and Hollywood Actor Ted Raimi at their day jobs left me wanting more. Fortunately, through the magic of comic books, there is more. A lot more. And now, just in time for the Halloween night debut of the Ash Vs Evil Dead TV show, the folks over at Humble Bundle are offering up a pretty massive collection of Ash's adventures for whatever you want to pay, with a chunk of the proceeds going to benefit Doctors Without Borders, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the CBLDF.

The weekend is here! Put down your paperwork, throw your stationery out of the window, and do a victory spin in your office chair, because it’s time to catch up on that greatest of all media: comics! What’s been going on this week? There’s so much comics that there’s no way anybody can keep up with all of it — so Weekender is here to catch you up on some of the stories you may have missed, and some of the best writing about comics from the past few days.

From October 27 to September 3, the American Library Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and a dozen other organizations made up of creators, publishers, teachers and journalists will be celebrating Banned Books Week. Well, maybe "celebrating" is the wrong word for a 33 year-old campaign designed to raise awareness of censorship by championing books that were challenged or banned from libraries across the country, but there's at least one good reason to have a good time with it. To mark the occasion, the folks over at Humble Bundle have launched a pay-what-you-want collection of banned and challenged comics, including Jeff Smith's Bone, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen and more --- complete with reasons why they were challenged.

This week's Humble Book Bundle is built around Dungeons & Dragons comics, and while there are a whole lot of comics in there, I'm going to go ahead and guess that whether or not you're going to enjoy a lot of them depends entirely on how you feel about Drizzt Do'Urden, most noble of the dark elves of Menzoberranzan and the twin scimitars that he uses to battle the evil of Faerûn alongside his astral panther Guenhwyvar. If that's your jam, well, you don't need any more convincing to get over there and check it out. If it's not, well, you still need to get over there and check it out, because you can pay whatever the heck you want for John Rogers and Andrea DiVito's 2011 run on Dungeons & Dragons, one of the best fantasy comics of all time.

The Humble Bundle's biweekly book sales have become a bit of a risky proposition for people on the lookout for cheap comics. On the one hand, you can get a whole bunch of stuff for whatever price you want to pay, with more content unlocked at a still-pretty-low price of $15, and you get to support a charity while you're at it. On the other hand, sometimes you end up reading a bunch of Transformers comics for the next six months. Really, though, it's almost always worth looking into, and the bundle that launched this week is no exception. The theme is comics based on music, and for $15, you can grab the first volume of The Wicked + The Divine, Phonogram, Nowhere Men, Hip Hop Family Tree, and more.

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.

Digital comics have grown in several different directions over the last few years, but one of the most interesting developments is how they've enabled people to try new ways of distributing comics, marketing to readers, and building an audience. The Humble Bundle is perhaps one of the most fascinating new models; a pay what you want program that works with publishers to offer huge collections of comics in one go. From the very first Image Comics bundle last year right through to the new Gamer Comics bundle with Dark Horse, companies have seen incredible sales through this system, expanding audiences by staggering degrees. With Humble Bundles now a routine mini-event for comics readers, ComicsAlliance spoke to the company's director of books, Kelley Allen, about how so much has changed over just one year, and where she sees Humble Bundle heading over the next few years.

Over the past few years, the Humble Bundle has become a pretty reliable source for getting great comics at incredibly cheap prices, to the point where I finally had to sit down and read a bunch of comic books about robots that turn into cars because it just didn't make financial sense not to. This week, though, it looks like they're officially done fooling around. The current bundle, which runs through June 10th, finds Humble teaming up with IDW and Top Shelf to offer a massive amount of books.