Ghouls, demon slayers and socially anxious students: how manga conquered the world

They range from science fiction epics to high-school romance and are selling faster than publishers can print them. But what has driven this new appetite for Japanese comics?

Eternal Spring review – animated inquisition into Falun Gong’s Chinese media hijack

The story of a TV protest by the Falun Gong movement, and its painful aftermath, is told through the eyes of exiled Chinese comic-book artist Daxiong

Illuminations by Alan Moore review – a savaging of the superhero industry

A short-story collection from the Watchmen creator takes aim at the comics industry and populist fascism in America

Je Ne Sais Quoi by Lucie Arnoux review – the loneliness of a Frenchwoman in London

The Anglophile cartoonist’s account of her new life in the capital is charming and insightful

Protesters in Iran are ‘beautiful and inspiring’, says Persepolis creator

‘What I have lived, the youth is living now,’ says Marjane Satrapi, whose graphic novel depicted girl’s life in 1979 Islamic revolution

Watchmen author Alan Moore: ‘I’m definitely done with comics’

As he releases his first short story collection, the revered writer talks about magic, the problem with superhero movies and why he will never write another graphic novel

Ducks by Kate Beaton review – powerful big oil memoir

The cartoonist mines her time working in Canada’s oil fields to paint an angry and humane picture of the destructiveness of humankind

Longest single-volume book in the world goes on sale – and is impossible to read

The 21,450-page volume of manga series One Piece is physically unreadable, to highlight how comics now exist as commodities

Stop laughing at the back: why shouldn’t Joker 2 be a musical?

With Lady Gaga and Brendon Gleeson in the cast, director Todd Phillips sequel project would sit fine with the nuttiness of the current DC universe

El Alto: graphic novel depicts Bolivia city’s future as Indigenous and robotic

Altopía imagines the bustling working-class city that overlooks neighbouring La Paz in 2053 – with coca-chewing cyborgs and minibuses with legs

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero review – eye-candy anime is gloriously mesmeric

The immensely popular franchise is back with a bewildering cast of brightly coloured characters in a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs

Forget Batgirl, where’s Superman Lives? The inside stories of Hollywood’s biggest abandoned films

Eliot Ness hunts a killer, Nicolas Cage plays the Man of Steel and Marilyn Monroe is The Girl in Pink Tights in films that were never released. A writer, a producer and a film expert tell the movies’ hidden histories

Le Petit Nicolas illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé dies aged 89

Sempé co-created much-loved French children’s books that have sold more than 15m copies worldwide

Raymond Briggs was famous for his grumpiness – but behind the facade he was shy, thoughtful and kind

The writer and illustrator – who has died aged 88 – was a stalwart of children’s literature, but readers of all ages delighted in his characters. The cartoonist Posy Simmonds remembers the man behind the drawings

Raymond Briggs remembered: ‘He made what he did look easy. Which is, of course, what geniuses do’

The beloved writer and illustrator of the Snowman and Father Christmas has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute