Mike Shuttleworth has just visited Angoulême, France, for the 38th Festival international de la bande dessinée, the world’s biggest international comics festival. In a cross-post from his blog, he tells us what he found there.

Imagine the crowd at the MCG, the AFL grand final. Double it and then add a few thousand more. More than 200,000 people turned up for the 38th Angoulême…

This week has been a veritable hotbed of controversy. Here’s our wrap.

Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian blogger, was abducted by Syrian authorities during the week, prompting howls of protest around the world - at least until it emerged that she may be the figment of someone’s imagination. If that’s the case, it would be a distasteful distraction from the life-and-death struggle many Syrians…