Comics, manga, & graphic novel deals / bundles

We've had comic book threads and we have an active anime thread, so some of you may be interested in digital comics bargains. Humble has pretty good comics / manga / graphic novel bundles once in a while. They've got two of them going right now (and a great Jonathan Hickman one that just ended, sorry), so it seemed worth a thread.

With Humble, you can start with the $1 tier to check the file quality and see if you can deal with comics on a tablet / laptop / monitor and then bump your purchase to a higher tier up to a week after the bundle closes. I've bought a few and the PDFs range from acceptable to good. They're not too clunky on an iPad.

I don't think they're region locked, but check the fine print.

The "full set" of Walking Dead comics is $18 and runs for another 3.5 days, until Wed. the 20th. The whole Walking Dead thing has passed me by, so maybe I'll jump in.

Joe Hill's Locke & Key & more tops out at $15 and runs for another 17.5 days, until Wed., June 3rd. I found out about L&K from an earlier Humble bundle, and I'm glad I did. Nice art style, well told. The first volume is "Welcome to Lovecraft," so it's pretty dark.

 

Humble doesn’t have a storefront to sell comics or manga individually (like, say, Comixology). They just have the occasional (usually starts on a Wednesday and runs for two weeks) comics/manga bundle (mostly Kondansha manga, AFAIK: Ajin, Attack on Titan, Battle Angel Alita, Blame, Fairy Tale, Vinland Saga). The ones that feature most or all of a comics’ run are obviously better than those that feature a bunch of first issues/volumes, as you’re getting a complete set for the price of a single volume. It’s worth mentioning they’re DRM-free.

They occasionally have repeats, so you might get a second chance at a bundle you missed.

I’ve only bought a comics bundle from one other site (to complete a Humble bundle for Garth Ennis’ The Boys). Turns out it wasn’t storybundle.com but Groupees. It looks like they’re running another comics bundle right now that ends in 8 days (ooh, there’s some Moebius in there): https://groupees.com/humanoids

Edit: I’m glad you made me dig up that previous Groupees bundle, because otherwise I wouldn’t have found their current Humanoids bundle. I also just stumbled across this post about French & Belgian comics that explains the Groupees bundle. That’s serendipity, baby!

“Métal Hurlant was a French comics anthology of science fiction and horror comics stories, created in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and financial director Bernard Farkas.

The four were collectively known as Les Humanoïdes Associés (United Humanoids), which became the name of the publishing house releasing Métal Hurlant. Few magazines have been that influential in comics. The collective single-handedly ended the ligne claire supremacy, introduced new narrative layouts, open the closed Western European comic circle to foreign influences and redefined the meaning of science-fiction. Masterworks such as Alien or Jodorowsky's Dune owe them basically everything.”

So this bundle is named for the publisher, Humanoids, which is why it includes Moebius’s The Incal and Jodorowsky’s The Metabarons. $15 gets you both of those series and more, but if you prefer Comixology (and Guided View, assuming it’s available for everything they sell), you can get just those two for $14 (each volume is on sale for $1 each, cheaper than their bundles). Actually, it looks like a lot of the comics in the Groupees bundle are on sale for $1 each, but you’ll end up paying more than the $15 Groupees is asking for to “own” that whole bundle.

 

Okay, this is getting a little weird. Humble broke out another (Kodansha) manga bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/award-winning-manga-by-kodansha-books

I liked the first volume of Space Brothers that I picked up in a previous Humble. Can’t beat trying the next four for $1.

Edit: Details on how much of each series' run you're getting in the bundle.

 

Fanatical has a Dynamite Action comics bundle that’s a lot of Army of Darkness, Barbarella, and Red Sonja but also some other stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Wheel of Time (?!): https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/dynamite-action-bundle

I can’t even remember reading any manga until Berserk blew my mind like five years ago. Love Hina sounds like the polar opposite genre, but maybe I need it to counteract Berserk’s rat people (I thought the anime was dark...).

That Groupees Humanoids bundle ended up with 70+ volumes (not individual issues, but volumes) after all the stretch goals (just $15k) were reached. It only raised $16k with a $15 top tier. What’s crazy is all the stretch goals were added to the base $2 tier. The pdf/cbz downloads require a batch renamer because most of the file names are 987654321.pdf or something, and—at least on an iPad—it’s hard to tell which comic you’re downloading based on a cropped image and no label. They have a Download All button at the top of the page with an equally confusing drop-down list (pdf pdf cbz cbz—the second of each might be torrent links) that, if clicked, will send a file every second to your browser’s download queue. That’s 70+ 100Mb+ files. Everything about this bundle was a trip. Thanks again for helping me stumble onto it, orangelupa!

I think a Humanoids rep mentioned in the chat at the bottom of the page that they’ll do another bundle with Groupees, eventually.

 

Humble Comic [sic] Bundle: Image Comics Showcase

Nine more days, $18 top tier. Not complete or even reasonably current runs for all of them (Sex Criminals has finished with 30+1 issues, but they only include volume one with issues 1-10), but there's a lot and a seemingly good mix. Curse Words is complete, so there may be others.

Again, hard to argue with the value considering how much you get for the price of a volume or two, but you can always try the $1 tier and boost to the top tier within a week of the bundle ending.

 

If you missed The Humanoids (Moebius, Jodorowsky, ...) Groupees comics bundle a little while back, Humble's got you covered for the next 17.5 days:

The Incal & More Presented by The Humanoids ($15 top tier)

There's quite a bit of overlap but enough new comics to annoy me. Humanoids did say they'd do another bundle with Groupees, so maybe Groupees will get the Humble "exclusives" in the next round. Still, hard to argue with picking up even just the new titles for $15. I might pick up the $1 tier to check on file size differences.

Differences from r/HumbleBundles:

 

A couple more days for the Judge Dredd, 2000 AD, & more Humble bundle. $15 top tier. Goodreads reviews. Redditor list of which series are complete.

21 days left for The Boys Versus Project Superpowers Humble bundle, launched to coincide with the new season on Amazon Prime.

 

Humble’s latest Image Comics bundle ends on Wednesday. It has some repeats (e.g., Descender, East of West, Gideon Falls), possibly incomplete series, and a $25 top tier, but it’s still a good deal (100 issues of The Savage Dragon!) with some well-regarded titles (e.g., Descender, East of West, Gideon Falls ).