I didn't know Franco-Belgian comics were so popular outside of french-speaking countries.
IMO here are the main differences between Franco-Belgian and American comics:
1. not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes. Every protagonist is a normal person, though sometimes extremely competent. This results in much more variety in the industry.
I'm not sure why they didn't even try to copy the American model if only for business reasons, but I'm thankful for it.
2. Each comic usually gets a single 50-page issue per year. (Seriously, there's a series I've been reading since I was 8, and you can marathon it in a few sittings.) I think this reduces the amount of "filler issues" or low quality churn, as the author has lots of time to get things right.
3. Most of the time the comics are written by the same author, usually the creator of the characters. They're not getting pimped out to every author out there for a run. It makes things more cohesive IMO.
My favorite series is Thorgal, by the author of XIII and Largo Winch. It's a fantasy series set at the time of the vikings, with light sci-fi and magical elements. Think of it like Conan but with a non-violent hero. Read issue 9, The Archers, for an standalone story that can give you an idea of what it's like before you commit. It's been running since the 80s, but once the author retired a decade or so ago, some younger guy took over the writing, and you can see the quality of the writing drop off, so I never kept up. But you got 30 years worth of good books, about 35 issues IIRC.
asterix heros are kind of brilliant like that. asterix is like superman but superman has superpowers that can be thwarted by kryptonite while asterix is simply the cleverest gauleois that makes the most out of getafix’s potion (wait, get a fix?? is that a pun I just discovered after 20 years?)
On the other hand obelix is a big dummy that always has the potion superpowers (by virtue of falling in a coldron of it when he was young) and is terrible at using his superpowers without the help of the cunning asterix.
The comics code authority neutered American comics for 4 decades. It's only when its grip started faltering that American comics got interesting again.
There are basically no European comics from the silver age period that wouldn't violate the CCA code in some way. American comics were samey precisely because the formulaic stories they told were basically the only ones that were allowed.
Gaston LaGaffe is finally available in English as Gomer Goof for those who can't read French (or any of the many other languages, including minor ones like Norwegian, who got translations long before English)
Tintin and Asterix are pretty popular in the UK and India. Easily found in most bookshops. Beyond those series, it’s much harder to find other Franco-Belgian comics. Even the Adventures of Jo and Zette isn’t that well known.
But Tintin and Asterix are very easily available. India has local language translations of Tintin and Asterix as well, example[1].
I was born in northern France, spent my childhood reading "comics", visited the "comics museum" in Bruxelles multiple times and never heard of the Adventures of Jo and Zette before your comment.
So I can understand why it's not well known in anglosaxon's countries.
> not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes
I would argue that Rork - one of my favorite Franco-Belgian comic characters - counts as one. He would not feel very out of place at DC's Vertigo as Constantine's colleague of sorts.
And then there are Asterix and his friend Obelix, who having access to powers unavailable to regular humans, go around solving problems by punching people particularly hard - just like a regular Marvel/DC character would. ;)
I have found Blake & Mortimer [0] to also be a very interesting series. The graphical style is very similar to Tintin as the author (Edgar P Jacobs) worked together with Hergé in some capacity and later became a friend.
Franco-belgian comics are popular everywhere except for the English-speaking world. It wasn't rare for a comic to be translated to a dozen languages, and English wasn't one of them.
The really big ones (Asterix, the Smurfs, Tintin) of course exist in English, but they're not all that popular, especially in the US. Niche US comic book publishers like Fantasy Flight periodically try to market some of the less-known but good looking F-B comics, but they rarely have the commercial success to have a whole series translated.
Franquin once made a joke about it, in one of the Marsupilami books there's a parodically evil American assassin who claims one if his victims was a Mr. Gagman who made the mistake of trying to introduce French comics to the US market.
I think that to many Americans, Franco-Belgian comics code as "children's comics" due to the drawing style. But most of them are directed at teens or older, just like US superhero comics.
Sadly, they're not popular in the U.S., but I love them. I switched my comics reading habit after nearly 30 years to European comics and haven't looked back. I prefer Asterix over Tintin, but I think reading Tintin with some of the historical background in mind might help. One of these days...
For anyone in North America looking for European comics to read, I review them at PipelineComics.com - there's something in European comics for everyone, from humor to action to drama and everything else.
Asterix is more aimed at children, compared to Tintin. Also, one of the best/funniest parts of Asterix is the constant wordplay, which often does not translate well (though the translators do try).
Thorgal was pretty big here in Poland because up until 2018 the illustrator was Grzegorz Rosiński, who is Polish.
I remember Franco-Belgian comics being more popular around here - partly because those few American comics which you could see on store shelves usually contained a lot of gore, so they were appropriately labeled.
I have no source for this so anecdotal, but I read in some comic anthology that boycotting American superhero comics was an intentional act to preserve the local comics legacy.
It didn't resist Manga equally well, though.
As a Belgian, it is always a surprise to see people from all around the world mention Tintin! I think a lot of us grew up with it as well as The Smurfs, Lucky Luke or "Spirou" and it's only when I was in my teens that I realized most of those were known internationally! Even though I'm in my twenties, I feel like this is one of the truly inter-generational piece of culture we share in a somewhat divided country.
Don’t forget Yoko Tsuno, Achille Talon (they were my dads I didn’t understand them), Agent 212, les 4 as, Blake and Mortimer, le chat, and so many more. Most of these are ligne claire style and I think that’s herge’s influence.
You should checkout the Fantasio series also by Franquin. It’s almost all in the 50s and 60s. It’s great! Interestingly, internationally, Franquin’s biggest success seems to have been the marsupilami. The art is amazing and he’s fun. I just wish it had been Gaston. M’enfin!
Tintin was, and still is, immensely popular in my part of India. My parents were fond of Tintin while growing up, and they introduced me to it as a child in the mid-2000s. I loved reading the comic books; in fact, I read some of them many times over. One thing I found out later was that the names of the characters are changed across translations. For instance, in Bengali (the language I first read it in), Tintin's pet is called Kuttush, while in English it is Snowy. Anyways, it's interesting to think that one of the things I share in fondness with my parents is a comic book series from a country that is very far away from my own. Art can indeed transcend boundaries.
I travelled to India and Nepal right after high school from Los Angeles in 1982. I bought a copy of Tintin in Tibet in India and it is still on my bookshelf all these years later. Really nice to read the backstory about Chang.
I read them in India in the 90s and 2000s. IIRC the books were imported (price was printed in GBP) and made from very high quality paper, so they were too expensive for us to buy. But the book store owner was a school friend of my parents so he let me read them for free :D
Oh man this brings back memories. Internet was not a thing and I couldn't afford to buy them. So we had these makeshift "libraries" where you can "rent" books. Id pester the owner of the rental to get me particular Tintin/asterix books that my friends had read before me!!
In order to not let the copy of Tintin deteriorate—-I would get them bound—-a few of them together. A faint memory recalls that they were in sequence eg. Explorers of the moon after Destination moon!
It's pretty cool, that these comics have been read so far and for so long. Being from a bit later, I had no idea they were already famous all the way to India.
Indeed, Astérix is French though! Other recommendations I can make are "Les Tuniques Bleues" (the Bluecoats) or Mélusine the Witch. For adult readers, "Largo Winch" or "XIII" are both excellent comics.
I grew up reading Asterix and Tintin in the UK. Plus a lot of other French/Belgian comics which I've since forgotten. And of course British classics like Dandy and Beano.
The thing with the French/Belgian comics is that the stories weren't just short skits but real stories. Self-contained in the case of Asterix and Tintin.
As an adult I discovered manga and have never looked back. I've been reading one series for 20 years now (One Piece) and have finished countless others.
Also British, and old to boot. I read Tintin extensively as a child and a bit of Asterix. Strangely I never really thought of them as comics before this discussion here, precisely because they were a single long form story per book. I actually remember most Tintins I read being proper hard back affairs loaned from the library.
I read the Beano weekly which is my understanding of what a comic is, lots of two to three page skits as you say.
I never really got into American comics such as Marvel, I guess they fit somewhere in the middle in terms of being a periodical but with a substantial storyline?
There was an animated series that ran on Nickelodeon, a popular US kids' channel in the 90's, so I'd imagine that many Americans (like myself) are familiar with it for that reason. It also got me to read the comics which then lead to some questions about why my local library didn't carry certain ones.
Hello fellow Belgian! It's always been tough to maintain the collecting overseas, what with expensive shipping costs. I've always found it peculiar that scanned francophone comics are not as prevalent as both American and Japanese comics.
I feel like any graphic novel fan would eat up our classics like XIII
The lacking scans might be because you can get them for free in most libraries round here. I borrowed loads of them at my local library in our tiny town, great comics! They were even translated to Swedish so I could start on them very early in life.
It's one of the most translated series of books in the world! Certainly one of the most well-known BD/comics ever.
I was at the Hergé exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation a few months back and there was a wall with Tintin album covers in every language. It was quite a big wall!
Growing up in India, I had been a huge fan of Tintin. Reading books, and buying them, you had to be at least middle class, it wasn't accessible as libraries in the West. But still, was popular as I recall amongst the well educated since at least the late 90's and early 00's (when I grew up) I think.
Comics is literally the only thing I know Belgium for.
It always confuses me that such a small country is so prolific. If you tell me mthat the us or japan produce a large fraction of the world's comics, that's not surprising as they have large fraction of the first world's population. But Belgium, how do you explain that?
Both Tintin and Asterix are appreciated surprisingly much by younger kids. I find them a bit awkward for loud reading, since you have to do so much pointing and so many voices to keep it coherent, but it is a good burden to carry.
The great Belgian treasure is Peyo’s Johan et Pirlouit, which of course gave us the Smurfs. It’s sad only the latter ever achieved global notoriety, as the former is among the greatest heights of cartooning.
I still watch Tintin's animated series and the movie from time to time. They're just so well made, such amazingly adventurous stories.
Idealistic guy, always standing up for righteousness, not afraid to be in difficult situations for people who are close to him. Many great moral lessons can be found in Tintin.
They're on YouTube so whenever I feel like watching the 'Uncharted before Uncharted was a thing', I put up Adventures of Tintin (1991).
Quite the opposite. It's very interesting so see how his point of view on strangers and especially black people changed.
In an interview, he told his story wasn't racist on purpose ; he truly believed that was how black people were based on the very few informations he had at the time - he never traveled outside of Belgium.
When he made the next one with a chinese person, he contacted a student who was originally from China to educate himself on how Asia really was, the culture, the people, etc. And that's how he came up with one of the best books of this career.
This was the one Tintin my mum wouldn't let me have as a child - at the time I thought it grossly unfair, and argued that surely she could just point out the aspects that were offensively racist the way she'd point out problematic aspects of anything else she might read to me / introduce to me to read myself.
I don't remember the specifics, as it's the only Tintin story I've only read once rather than many times, but when I did read it in my early 20s I immediately told her that I no longer disagreed with her decision to keep it out of the hands of her children.
I think its bad to censor these types of things. People need to see how we evolve as society and not hide this just because it could upset someone today.
Quite the opposite. It's very important to (1) know what the accepted (in fact, majority) views were not that long ago, and (2) to witness an example of how a man could so clearly change his worldviews despite being educated and mentored in the Catholic ultraconservatism that gave him his former views.
I remember reading those comics as a kid. They always felt special in a way that e.g. Spirou didn't. I think the article is right that the relatively higher amount of realism was one thing that set these comics apart. Also their "international" approach, with Tintin traveling around the world to investigate. Some of them were written like action/crime thrillers aimed at adults.
The TV series was also pretty good. I still remember the dramatic intro with Tintin jumping from a train on a bridge into a river:
The more recent Tintin movie by Spielberg was also great. It had blockbuster vibes entirely comparable to Spielberg classics like Indiana Jones, but he kept it close enough to the source comic. Unfortunately Peter Jackson never made the second part.
A friend of my mother in Peru had those books. I'm fond of my memories about Milú (the dog, not sure about the spelling), the captain, the scientific, the silly detectives, and Tintin. Specially the book about the travel to the moon (in those years the moon was a hot topic.)
I was big into Tintin as a kid as well in 2000. I checked out library books and eventually began to purchase my own volumes every time we went on a family road trip. My nephews recently found them at my parents and I’m happy to see they are enjoying them as much as I did.
IMHO Tintin is at his best when dealing with international politic like in Le Lotus bleu, L'Oreille cassée, Le Sceptre d'Ottokar, L'Affaire Tournesol, Au Pays de l'or noir.
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IMO here are the main differences between Franco-Belgian and American comics:
1. not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes. Every protagonist is a normal person, though sometimes extremely competent. This results in much more variety in the industry. I'm not sure why they didn't even try to copy the American model if only for business reasons, but I'm thankful for it.
2. Each comic usually gets a single 50-page issue per year. (Seriously, there's a series I've been reading since I was 8, and you can marathon it in a few sittings.) I think this reduces the amount of "filler issues" or low quality churn, as the author has lots of time to get things right.
3. Most of the time the comics are written by the same author, usually the creator of the characters. They're not getting pimped out to every author out there for a run. It makes things more cohesive IMO.
My favorite series is Thorgal, by the author of XIII and Largo Winch. It's a fantasy series set at the time of the vikings, with light sci-fi and magical elements. Think of it like Conan but with a non-violent hero. Read issue 9, The Archers, for an standalone story that can give you an idea of what it's like before you commit. It's been running since the 80s, but once the author retired a decade or so ago, some younger guy took over the writing, and you can see the quality of the writing drop off, so I never kept up. But you got 30 years worth of good books, about 35 issues IIRC.
Or extremely incompetent! Gaston LaGaffe springs to mind, it's one of the most endearing and nice comics that I've had the pleasure to read.
And in a way Asterix is a superhero.
What strikes me about European comics from that era is that they are in general much more interesting culturally.
There are basically no European comics from the silver age period that wouldn't violate the CCA code in some way. American comics were samey precisely because the formulaic stories they told were basically the only ones that were allowed.
But Tintin and Asterix are very easily available. India has local language translations of Tintin and Asterix as well, example[1].
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tintin+bengali&t=fpas&iax=images&i...
Anecdotally the quality of the Asterix translations are pretty good, too, complete with the funny character names.
I would argue that Rork - one of my favorite Franco-Belgian comic characters - counts as one. He would not feel very out of place at DC's Vertigo as Constantine's colleague of sorts.
And then there are Asterix and his friend Obelix, who having access to powers unavailable to regular humans, go around solving problems by punching people particularly hard - just like a regular Marvel/DC character would. ;)
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_and_Mortimer
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_P._Jacobs
The really big ones (Asterix, the Smurfs, Tintin) of course exist in English, but they're not all that popular, especially in the US. Niche US comic book publishers like Fantasy Flight periodically try to market some of the less-known but good looking F-B comics, but they rarely have the commercial success to have a whole series translated.
Franquin once made a joke about it, in one of the Marsupilami books there's a parodically evil American assassin who claims one if his victims was a Mr. Gagman who made the mistake of trying to introduce French comics to the US market.
I think that to many Americans, Franco-Belgian comics code as "children's comics" due to the drawing style. But most of them are directed at teens or older, just like US superhero comics.
So is the little rabbit thing I forget the name of.
They are predominantly children’s books, of course.
Now… Rooi Oortjes isn’t known.
For anyone in North America looking for European comics to read, I review them at PipelineComics.com - there's something in European comics for everyone, from humor to action to drama and everything else.
Um... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdupont
> It is a spoof of American super-hero comics that sends up French national attitudes.
I remember Franco-Belgian comics being more popular around here - partly because those few American comics which you could see on store shelves usually contained a lot of gore, so they were appropriately labeled.
The thing with the French/Belgian comics is that the stories weren't just short skits but real stories. Self-contained in the case of Asterix and Tintin.
As an adult I discovered manga and have never looked back. I've been reading one series for 20 years now (One Piece) and have finished countless others.
I read the Beano weekly which is my understanding of what a comic is, lots of two to three page skits as you say.
I never really got into American comics such as Marvel, I guess they fit somewhere in the middle in terms of being a periodical but with a substantial storyline?
I feel like any graphic novel fan would eat up our classics like XIII
I was at the Hergé exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation a few months back and there was a wall with Tintin album covers in every language. It was quite a big wall!
Tintin is surprisingly portable across generations, cultures, and genres.
It always confuses me that such a small country is so prolific. If you tell me mthat the us or japan produce a large fraction of the world's comics, that's not surprising as they have large fraction of the first world's population. But Belgium, how do you explain that?
Including some hilarious ones like the smurfstrijd/taalsmurf, a play on the Belgian issue of language.
Idealistic guy, always standing up for righteousness, not afraid to be in difficult situations for people who are close to him. Many great moral lessons can be found in Tintin.
They're on YouTube so whenever I feel like watching the 'Uncharted before Uncharted was a thing', I put up Adventures of Tintin (1991).
In an interview, he told his story wasn't racist on purpose ; he truly believed that was how black people were based on the very few informations he had at the time - he never traveled outside of Belgium.
When he made the next one with a chinese person, he contacted a student who was originally from China to educate himself on how Asia really was, the culture, the people, etc. And that's how he came up with one of the best books of this career.
This was the one Tintin my mum wouldn't let me have as a child - at the time I thought it grossly unfair, and argued that surely she could just point out the aspects that were offensively racist the way she'd point out problematic aspects of anything else she might read to me / introduce to me to read myself.
I don't remember the specifics, as it's the only Tintin story I've only read once rather than many times, but when I did read it in my early 20s I immediately told her that I no longer disagreed with her decision to keep it out of the hands of her children.
I think adults can manage reading things they disagree with and consider inappropriate.
people literally watch horror movies.
The TV series was also pretty good. I still remember the dramatic intro with Tintin jumping from a train on a bridge into a river:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=APrxbp3zpBw
The more recent Tintin movie by Spielberg was also great. It had blockbuster vibes entirely comparable to Spielberg classics like Indiana Jones, but he kept it close enough to the source comic. Unfortunately Peter Jackson never made the second part.