FREE/BARGAIN — Comics

[Cactus Chef]

Amazon/Comixology/Marvel's yearly Masterworks sale is back. Grab a bunch of Marvel Masterworks Comics for $1.99 or less:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/co...t=mobile-atf-7

[ZodWallop]

Marvel's Distinguished Competition is also having a massive sale on some great stuff. I don't care about superheroes, so DC has far better pickings for me (though believe me, there's more Batman than you can shake a stick at):

100 Bullets - The giant omnibuses are $2.99 each, $15 buys the entire series (The smaller collections are $1.99 each)

If a stranger offered you a chance to get away with murder...would you take it? In this dark, multiple award-winning crime series, ordinary citizens are given the opportunity to exact revenge on a person that has wronged them. Guaranteed full immunity, what would you do?

Grant Morrison's Animal Man - Two collections, $4 and $5. $9 would buy the whole series.

“Morrison told the story of a kind-hearted, vegetarian hero who loses his family and is pushed to the brink of insanity before confronting his author in the run’s extraordinarily meta finale.” —Rolling Stone

JSA: The Golden Age - $1.99 (Amazon lists it as a 2 book series, but it's just two editions of the same book. Both are $1.99. Weird.)

Set during the start of one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, the infamous "McCarthy Era," THE GOLDEN AGE takes a thought-provoking look at what might have happened to DC's first generation of superheroes beyond their exploits during the Second World War, when paranoia has taken a chokehold on America.

The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke - $3.99

Darwyn Cooke’s acclaimed epic is back in a new title collecting the 6-issue miniseries plus JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER SPECIAL #1! When Cold War paranoia outlawed the heroes of the Golden Age, stalwarts such as Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman continued to fight for truth and justice. But as the world hurtled toward an uncertain future, a new breed of hero would define the American Way!

DMZ - The giant omnibuses are $2.99 each, $15 buys the entire series (The smaller collections are $1.99 each)

Aspiring photojournalist Matty Roth gets trapped in battle-weary Manhattan during America's second civil war. He takes a once in a lifetime opportunity to follow a veteran war journalist into the middle of the DMZ. But taking it leads to more than just a scoop...it leads to a whole new life.

Ex Machina - $1.99 per collected book. $10 for the whole series

When an accident gives Mitchell Hundred amazing powers, he becomes America's first living super-hero. Eventually tiring of risking his life merely to help maintain the status quo, he retires from crime-fighting and runs for Mayor of NYC, winning by a landslide. And that's where his adventure begins...

Fables - The big books are $2.99, the smaller ones $1.99

When the Adversary conquered the lands of legends, the inhabitants were forced into exile. They form a secret society, a hidden enclave in modern-day New York. Bill Willingham's award-winning "fractured-fairy-tale" series explores the world of these beloved fables...one that exists within our own.

Transmetropolitan - The giant omnibuses are $2.99 each, $15 buys the entire series (The smaller collections are $1.99 each)

In the near future, gonzo journalist/cult author Spider Jerusalem lives fast and loose in The City--a chaotic melting pot of cultures, subcultures, lifeforms, and technologies. Creators Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson deliver in this sharp, manic, anything-goes extrapolation of urban life.

V for Vendetta - $5.99

*A powerful story about loss of freedom and individuality, V For Vendetta takes place in a totalitarian England following a devastating war that changed the face of the planet. In a world without political freedom, personal freedom and precious little faith in anything comes a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts. It's a gripping tale of the blurred lines between ideological good and evil.

Watchmen - $2.99

Alan Moore presents a world where the mere presence of American superheroes changed history--the U.S. won the Vietnam War, Nixon is still president, and the Cold War is in full effect. The Hugo Award-winning story chronicles the fall from grace of a group of superheroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the superhero is dissected as an unknown assassin stalks the erstwhile heroes.

Y: The Last Man - $1.99 each, the entire series is $10

Written by Brian K. Vaughan (Lost, EX MACHINA), this is the saga of Yorick Brown--the only human survivor of a planet-wide plague that instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. Accompanied by his pet monkey, Yorick searches for his lost love...and the answer to why he's the last man on earth.

[salty-horse]

Heartstopper Volume 1 by Alice Oseman is $2 on Amazon.com

Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. A sweet and charming coming-of-age story that explores friendship, love, and coming out. This edition features beautiful two-color artwork.

Shy and softhearted Charlie Spring sits next to rugby player Nick Nelson in class one morning. A warm and intimate friendship follows, and that soon develops into something more for Charlie, who doesn't think he has a chance.

But Nick is struggling with feelings of his own, and as the two grow closer and take on the ups and downs of high school, they come to understand the surprising and delightful ways in which love works.

[salty-horse]

Saga, volumes 1–10 (including the latest post-hiatus volume) is available for $30 as part of the Humble Bundle Türkiye-Syria earthquake relief fundraiser.
You also get a bunch of video games, some of them I can personally recommend.

[socnsum1]

Elfquest Humble Bundle.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/e...rse_bookbundle

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by socnsum1

Elfquest Humble Bundle.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/e...rse_bookbundle

I wish they were in color. I know Elfquest was first published in black and white, but it has been published over and over (and over again) in color. It's even available in color for free on the Pini's website.

But, don't let my complaining put you off. ElfQuest (if you haven't read it) is one of the great comic series of all time, black and white or color.

[Cactus Chef]

Humble Bundle on 2000AD comics:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/2...ebellion-books

I'm very tempted to go in just for the Slaine comics. One thing I can't figure out though is whether they all offer CBZs, or just some. The sidebar says "PDF and CBZ", but it seems like when clicking on the individual books, only Slaine: Warrior's Dawn is showing CBZ as an option.

[FourOhFour]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

The sidebar says "PDF and CBZ", but it seems like when clicking on the individual books, only Slaine: Warrior's Dawn is showing CBZ as an option.

Then that's the only one available in CBZ. They do that. It's annoying.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by FourOhFour

Then that's the only one available in CBZ. They do that. It's annoying.

Well, damn. Is the image quality the same between the two?

Does anyone know of a utility to easily pull the images out of a PDF? I've done it before with EPUBs and made my own CBZs out of them when an AZW/EPUB was the only option. It was much easier, though, since there was just an Images folder inside of the archive.

[FourOhFour]

Generally the PDF has better image quality.

So... here's how I convert from PDF. I'm on a Mac, but this is all open source command line stuff, so it should work elsewhere. I use poppler, installed via Homebrew with `brew install poppler`.

First, I use `pdfimages -all -p` to try just extracting the images. If you're lucky, this will result in usable files. Most commonly, though, you'll get the artwork without the text. Make sure to check a few pages.

If that didn't work, you're gonna need to render the PDF to images. I use `pdftoppm -scale-to <long dimension in px> -cropbox -png` Replace -png with -jpeg if you want smaller files. How big should the scale-to setting be? Well, the size of your device is a reasonable choice. Or maybe the same as the images you extracted with pdfimages. This is gonna be slow. It isn't multithreaded, consider running more than one instance using -f and -l to set the first and last pages to convert.

Is there an easier way? I hope so. But that's what I do.

[Cactus Chef]

Thanks! I'm on Linux, but it looks like someone packaged `poppler` for Fedora, so I'll buy them and give that a shot!

Worst-case scenario, I do all my comic reading on an Android tablet anyway, so PDFs aren't impossible to read, I just prefer CBZs.

[TrevorViking]

I have a vague memory of buying all of Elfquest digitally direct from the Pinis years and years ago, like pre-Comixology. But that was at least one email address and a couple hard drives ago, so I’ll probably just buy the Humble Bundle.

[andyh2000]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Humble Bundle on 2000AD comics:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/2...ebellion-books

I'm very tempted to go in just for the Slaine comics. One thing I can't figure out though is whether they all offer CBZs, or just some. The sidebar says "PDF and CBZ", but it seems like when clicking on the individual books, only Slaine: Warrior's Dawn is showing CBZ as an option.

Originally Posted by FourOhFour

Then that's the only one available in CBZ. They do that. It's annoying.

When I go to download them seven have a CBZ option as well as PDF.



(and bulk download of the PDFs only seems to download the first seven of those for some reason. Annoying.)

Andrew

[GlennD]

Originally Posted by TrevorViking

I have a vague memory of buying all of Elfquest digitally direct from the Pinis years and years ago, like pre-Comixology. But that was at least one email address and a couple hard drives ago, so I’ll probably just buy the Humble Bundle.

There may be reasons to find your old files. These are the Dark Horse editions, which are in black and white for the early quests at least. If you have color versions that you bought from a previous edition, you may want those instead.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by andyh2000

When I go to download them seven have a CBZ option as well as PDF.

Attachment 200153

(and bulk download of the PDFs only seems to download the first seven of those for some reason. Annoying.)

Andrew

Thanks. It's a little unnerving that some of the CBZ's where offered seem to be much larger than the PDFs, suggesting vastly different image quality. Note the two sizes on Slaine: Warrior's Dawn (27mb for the PDF vs. 141mb for the CBZ). A couple of the other PDFs in the 20-30mb range make me worry that they will be of terrible quality.

No idea where these are being sourced from, as I'm pretty sure the 2000AD shop has both a higher-quality PDF and a CBZ available.

But I suppose given that I'm getting more than 10 of these for $18 total instead of paying ten dollars a pop, I shouldn't complain...