Rebecca & Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbor by Pascal Girard review – postpartum PI

The fierce love and deathly boredom of maternity leave is addressed playfully in a delightful mystery for adults and kids

Spider-Man beats Superman in record $3.6m comic sale

A copy of Peter Parker’s debut in Amazing Fantasy #15 has swooped over the Man of Steel to fetch the highest price ever paid for a single comic

Why authors are turning down lucrative deals in favour of Substack

The newsletter platform has poached big names including Salman Rushdie along with a slew of comic book authors from DC and Marvel

‘That first year was a crazy rollercoaster’: why a new mother turned a crisis into cartoons

When her partner left her with a newborn one dark Finnish winter, Anna Härmälä didn’t crumble. Inspired by Fleabag, she turned her pain into raw, funny cartoons

Chris Riddell: ‘Maurice Sendak taught us playfulness could be profound’

The author-illustrator on being read Tolkien at school, the perfect picture book and struggling to crack The Da Vinci Code

On my radar: Paula Hawkins’s cultural highlights

The author of The Girl on the Train on discovering Alison Bechdel, identifying with Physical, and her favourite new crime novel

The Delicacy by James Albon review – razor-sharp restaurant world parable

Two ambitious brothers are driven to despair by the pressures of the kitchen in a vivid, shrewdly observed satire of fine dining

Batman’s sidekick, Robin, comes out as LGBTQ+ in new comic

DC’s latest issue of Batman: Urban Legends shows the superhero’s companion accepting a date invitation from another male character

Marvel and DC face backlash over pay: ‘They sent a thank you note and $5,000 – the movie made $1bn’

As the comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers and artists are speaking out about their struggles for fair payment

Wake review: a must-read graphic history of women-led slave revolts

Rebecca Hall and illustrator Hugo Martínez uncover hidden stories, vital truths and deep, unhealed, intergenerational pain

Forget AC-12, meet DS-5: Jed Mercurio on his new graphic novel Sleeper

Fresh from the record-breaking Line of Duty, Mercurio has created a conspiracy thriller set in the 24th-century, with co-writer Prasanna Puwanarajah and illustrator Coke Navarro

How we made Viz: ‘We printed 150 copies for £42.52’

‘There were complaints that The Fat Slags stereotyped women as sex objects – but they were using their sexuality to get what they wanted, so it was quite the opposite’

The Witches of the Orient review – very strange but true sports history

Julien Faraut’s documentary recounts how a Japanese women’s volleyball team recruited from factory workers became national heroes in the 60s

From the archive: a century’s worth of comics remembered, 1974

Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat, Christmas puddings like cannon balls… Yikes! By Chris Hall

In. by Will McPhail review – only connect

The cartoonist’s debut graphic novel is a fresh and moving account of a withdrawn young man waking up to the world