So much text, more like an illustrated book :)
Btw, did you know that Jacobs helped Hergé redrawing the backgrounds of some of the Tintin comics after the war? And Leloup (Yoko Tsuno) also worked for Hergé before starting his own series. There is an interview with him on youtube.
Speaking of walls of text, remember the explanation of the inner workings of an atomic reactor in Destination Moon? That's how 5 y.o. me discovered nuclear physics :]
All the treasure left behind when I moved to the United States.
- most if not all of those characters are french speaking
- lots of collaboration on those characters by French and Belgium author. For example Goscinny worked on Lucky Luke with Morris, the character of Spirou was created by Rob-Vel who is French, then worked on by Jijé and Franquin, etc
- though many were published in "Spirou", there were "Pilote", "Pig Gadget" and all which are French.
I think the whole concept is named "Bande dessinée Franco-belge" (at least here in France, maybe the point of view is different on your side of the frontier ^^)
I.e. the same way we all, wherever we're from, add extra words to define stuff that's not our default expectation ("a new neighbour moved in" if they're someone from the same place as us vs. "a new dutch neighbour" moved in if they're from that other country; or buying cheese in the shop vs. buying french cheese), just as a (subconscious often) time saving measure that there's no need to give the adjective when it fits the normal expectation.
Not that I'm an expert on the international nomenclature of bande dessinée comics - though anecdotally, as a Brit (England, not Brittany haha) who grew up reading Asterix and above all Tintin, I thought of them (and think my parents called them) separately as French and Belgian respectively.
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'm not aware of such a culture around francophone comics.
And to the sibling comment: I'd say in the origin countries the same is true. In Japan, kids buy physical manga at the convenience store. In the US, we go to the comic book store and pick up a batch of new releases. Yet somehow both of those have large communities of people scanning/translating/occasionally licensing the works. I wonder why it's different with French ones!
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.
> "One key problem," said Delporte, "was motive. The Americans might envision a Smurf inheriting money, which then filled the other Smurfs with envy. Or they would picture a Smurf finding some treasure and these riches causing problems in the village. Or… a Smurf would try and sell Papa Smurf's secret formula. Everything they proposed, every plot, revolved around money."
Peyo tried explaining that, for his characters, gain and greed were not even concepts. But these explanations were received as unthinkable. Says Delporte, "All they did was mutter behind Peyo's back. The view was 'This is all so sweet it's giving me cavities.'"