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.
I grew up on Asterix, but translated to Spanish. The names were all different, but usually good puns too. Admirable that they made that work in every language they translated them to!
As a kid discovering the puns over time was a delight. I still remember revisiting an issue after I had fractured my arm, and doing a happy double-take coming across a couple called Ulna and Radius (these are the bones in the forearm [1])!
And sometimes the English ones are better! And I say it as a French who grew up on Asterix. In my opinion, the original names are good, but not great, and the translators did an outstanding job.
For example, the original French name for Dogmatix is Idéfix, which conveys the same idea, but without the "dog" pun.
> wait, get a fix?? is that a pun I just discovered after 20 years?
If it's like in the French original (where Getafix is Assurancetourix, i.e. assurance tous-risques, full-coverage insurance), every single character name is a pun; so keep searching if you're missing some ;)
There are annotations which explain all the name puns, Latin translations etc.
Eg, in Asterix and the Big Fight, the character Cassius Ceramix - Ceramics: baked clay, earthenware. Cassius is a Roman name. Also a play on Cassius Clay, which was Mohammed Ali's given name
After growing up with Astérix and learning half my French from it (the other half from Tintin) there was a pun that I finally got only now, many years later, thanks to a French colleague.
In "Le Domaine des Dieux" (The Manions of the Gods) there is a character called "Oursenplus". This always registered to me as saying "And a bear" ("ours" is "bear" and "en plus" is like "one more" or "on top of that").
Then I asked my colleague: "I don't get this Oursenplus pun from Astérix, can you tell what it means?".
My colleague hadn't read the issue so he didn't immediately catch what I said, but he replied "Comment? Ours en peluche?"
Which, said quickly with a French accent sounds very much like "oursenplush" (with a "shh") and means ... "teddy bear" ("peluche" is "felt"; a plushy).
I have this kind of epiphany regularly with pop songs that I've known since childhood. I hear them again and my English is so much better now than it was back then that I realize I completely misunderstood the lyrics.
Dogmatix is an especially brilliant one, since the original is Idéafix (stubborn, single-minded, literally "of fixed ideas"), and the translation not only manages to preserve that meaning but also add "Dog" to it :)
English does have the loanword https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9e_fixe#English but I think this is often considered technical vocabulary (per Wiktionary, in psychology and music composition) that most native speakers would probably not recognize.
I meant that idea and fixed are both English words, so it should be possible to associate ideafix with "fixed idea" - a bit more obscure though than the original.
Yup, even as a kid I could tell the translators also had to be comedic geniuses too. I would constantly be marveling at the names, and how they were only a joke that made sense in English.
You will find Paul McCartney too. When I read them as a kid in India I missed many of these, not the Beatles or Dubbelosix.
I have read every one of the 'originals' (Goscinny and Uderzo ones) so many times, but even now when I re-read them in my late 40s I discover something that I had missed before. Usually something happening in the background -- mark of stellar writing and drawing.
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.
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.