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Comment by perakojotgenije | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood Americans' obsession with superhero comics. When I was a kid I was reading Asterix[1], Gaston Lagaffe[2], Spirou et Fantasio[3], Lucky Luke[4], Prince Valiant[5], The Phantom[6] and similar stuff. Of course, I've read Superman, Batman and Spiderman also but at least I've had a choice. I can't understand why they don't exist in US, why are the only comic books Americans know superhero comics?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_%28comics%29

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirou_et_Fantasio

[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Luke

[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Valiant

[6]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom

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Read up on the history of the Comics Code Authority[1]; I suspect that after the Comics Code was introduced, the remaining comic publishers were over-eager to prove their products were the exact opposite of the content prohibited by the Code, setting the thematic pendulum forever swinging toward and away from that content, instead of exploring broader themes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority

Yes, this exactly. The CCA grew out of a widespread moral panic about comic book content, and its effects on youth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent. Basically, after this, the once thriving comics industry in the USA was reduced to just superheroes as all other genres like romance, horror, detectives (there's a reason Batman was published in detective comics), science fiction, were considered too "dangerous." It's quite unfortunate.

There's other reasons of course as well - notably the rise of the collectors market, but the USA today is still overwhelmingly dominated by superheroes in the comics market.

Many of the non-superhero comic books in the U.S. end up being adult themed for various reasons. Even many notable French artists are only known here for their work in magazines like Heavy Metal.

One I grew up with (that I probably shouldn't have had as a child) was the Conan the Barbarian comics. Definitely not a superhero title, and definitely skewed towards the adult demographic.

Asterix has tried to penetrate the U.S. market several times, but the style says "newspaper comic strip" to Americans and that's where it got stuck.

Prince Valiant is also an American comic, shown mostly in newspapers.

Spirou et Fantasio looks excellent, I don't think there's ever been a concerted effort to translate the title into English.

Same with Gaston.

I personally think there's a deep well of wonderful French comics that have yet to really make it into the American market: Valérian and Laureline, Blueberry, Arzach, etc. Where the artwork and writing are wonderful. But then again, I think Arzach and other Moebius works ended up here under the Heavy Metal books, which are widely known among late-teen early adult readers.

> Even many notable French artists are only known here for their work in magazines like Heavy Metal.

It's not the artist, it's the environment. Moebius did amazing and innovative comics for the French and Belgian markets. Guess what he did once arrived in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Giraud#Marvel_Comics

hmmm...that's depressing.

I don't know about any previous attempts but Cinebook are working on Spirou et Fantasio in English - they're still ongoing but they're not in the original order (the 7 so far are 5 80s Tome & Janry titles followed by two Franquin 50s titles) so who knows how many they plan to do. http://www.cinebook.co.uk/index.php?cPath=182

It's a British English translation but I think any UK/US differences will be fairly small compared to the cultural differences from the original source era. I have books 2 and 5 and to be honest the racial stereotypes in book #2, from 1987, are more troubling than anything I remember in book #5, from 1952!

Fantastic! I'll have to seek these out.

I almost keep wanting to take some time to learn some basic French so I can read French comics. (I know it sounds kind of trite, but whatever motivates I suppose).

I was surprised the first time I went to France, I was more or less able to make out the gist of the majority of the Museum placards and explanations when there wasn't an English translation available. Common ancestor, French influence, Latin and all that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. America has non-superhero comics, of course - the Sandman series, Y: The Last Man, Preacher, The Walking Dead, American Vampire, etc.

...but Marvel Comics is superheros. Marvel is owned by Disney, and Disney has a huge marketing budget. DC Comics is superheros...owned by Warner Brothers.

EDIT: yeah...none of those that I mentioned are remotely for kids. Hmmm.

Allow me to add Elfquest, Cerebus the Aardvark, TMNT, Love and Rockets, and R. Crumb! Not sure if all of those are American or not, but a few of the non-superhero books I (as an American) grew up with.

Of course none of them was ever that widely known (apart from TMNT after it stopped being a comic), so the original point about the US and superheroes certainly remains.

I imagine it's partly due to the legacy of the CCA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority].

I think Cerebus is not a very good answer to the concerns brought up in this piece.

+bignum. I never minded impossibly proportioned Marvel heroines, but Cerberus put me off of comics for years.

I haven't read the article, its server is [edit:was] down. I was replying to the parent comments.

Probably not a good idea to have one's young daughter read Cerebus is I guess what I'm saying.

Not a good idea to have one's young son read it either.

As opposed to R. Crumb?

Sure - nor anything else I mentioned, nor anything in the post I replied to. They were just some non-superhero comics.

I grew up in Sweden so I rather fittingly had a school library with comics about norse mythology. [1]

Also I think everyone in Sweden has heard of Goliat. [2]

[1] http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhall_%28tecknad_serie%29

[2] http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliat_%28tecknad_serie%29

Superheroes of a different era.

No, not if the comics stay true to the mythology, anyway. Norse mythology is pretty similar to Greek. The Gods aren't really heroes; they are Gods. They lack the "hero" in "superhero".

The Marvel depiction of Loki is not as one-dimensional as that of Lex Luthor, for example, but the underlying myths actually depicts him a bit more nuanced still. And while the Gods are generally good, they are also at times foolish, funny and arrogant.

With wish fulfillment superpowers but recognizable as human.

Not all comic superheroes are two dimensional.

From the Wikipedia page on the "Golden Age" of comics.

"Although the creation of the superhero was the Golden Age's most significant contribution to pop culture, many genres appeared on the newsstands, including humor, Western, romance, and jungle stories. The Steranko History of Comics 2 notes that it was the non-superhero characters of Dell Comics — most notably the licensed Walt Disney animated character comics — that outsold all the supermen of the day. Dell Comics, featuring such licensed movie and literary properties as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Roy Rogers, and Tarzan, boasted circulations of over two million copies a month, and Donald Duck writer-artist Carl Barks is considered one of the era's major talents."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Comic_Books

There are also Wikipedia pages for Western and Romance comics.

So there used to be other kinds of comics in the U.S. As mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, the Comics Code Authority seems to have marked the end of non-superhero comics.

Asterix and Lucky Luke humour still makes me laugh. So many levels in deceptively simple drawings.

Later I spent a huge amount of time on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9onard_(comics)

I'm from the UK and loved my occasional childhood holidays in France or Portugal for a chance to buy Lucky Luke and Pink Panther comics. For some reason Asterix and Tintin were popular in the UK but other Franco-Belgian comics didn't take off. There were a few 70s prints of Lucky Luke and I have one translated 1970s Iznogoud but they went out of print quickly until Cinebook [0] started selling new translations about a decade ago, and the characters are much less well-known here than on the continent.

I think Gaston is still unavailable in English - I'm not such a fan of Spirou and Fantasio but I recently bought Cinebook's "The Marsupliami Thieves" as it was the only Franquin book available in English, sadly.

By the way, a recent HN thread on internationalization mentioned how few really well localized film translations there are and gave Shrek and Frozen as examples of good ones. The English translations of Asterix were brilliant and full of English-specific puns, presumably replacing original French puns (I have read some of them in French but my French is not really good enough for wordplay).

(edit: Although obviously the UK has its own tradition of kids-including-girls-friendly comics: Beano, Dandy, and many others. And for a modern equivalent I like the Phoenix comic [1]. But comic book shops here are mostly also very full of superhero comics and adult manga and not young-girl-friendly.)

[0] http://www.cinebook.co.uk [1] http://www.thephoenixcomic.co.uk/

Like you, I enjoy Gaston significantly more than Spirou; he also has a more adult work called Idées noires (Dark Thoughts), which is filled with great (and often disturbing) dark humor. It's probably not translated to English either, alas.

Similar comics existed (and exist) growing up in the U.S., but they are less prominent in comic book stores, and more prominent in traditional book stores or the Sunday paper. E.g., Calvin and Hobbes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes).

We got those in addition to those. E.g. Calvin and Hobbes had a monthly magazine in Norway until a decade after Watterson stopped drawing (publishing reruns after they'd run dry of original material) alongside guest series. On top of that comes the collected editions.

Some US newspaper strip artists end up earning more from Scandinavia (aggregate potential market of about 25 million) than the US because of this.

FWIW I read Asterix, TinTin, Lucky Luke and grew up in America.

> "I've never understood Americans' obsession with superhero comics. When I was a kid I was reading Asterix[1], Gaston Lagaffe[2], Spirou et Fantasio[3], Lucky Luke[4], Prince Valiant[5], The Phantom[6]"

It is a culture thing. Growing up in latinamerica in the 80's and 90's meant that I have access to four of the comics you mention and the ones coming from USA. Asterix's stories for instance were cool but I still preferred reading Superman, and I guess that's because in my original country we were closer to USA's culture than French culture.

As far as I can tell, many of the would-be non-superhero comic creators and readers skipped past print and moved to web comics. There's a huge variety in that space.

The Americans have produced the following fantastic series: [1] The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Times_of_Scrooge_M... [2] Donald Duck Adventures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_Adventures

I grew up on Asterix and Tintin.

How is Asterix not a superhero, though?

Asterix isn't a superhero - he's just a normal guy till he has his potion. I guess you could argue Obelix is, since it had a permanent effect on him. Neither of them dress up (any more that the rest of the characters).

Batman is just a normal guy with a lot of money, and still considered a superhero.

But Batman has a cape. Asterix and Obelix got their clothes made by Edna Mode: "no capes!".

The money only affects his capabilities. Rorschach only had a mask and an unshakable sense of purpose.

Asterix is an adventurer, not a superhero. He doesn't go around righting wrongs, he has adventures.

Grew up in South America. I read Disney comics. I found and tried to get into Marvel comics when I got older, but couldn't get into them. Too much stuff needing me to read other series ("hey if you want to know how The Hulk got here and saved IronMan from this peril, read xxx chapter y") to know what happened.

Mafalda seems exactly what you are looking for. Perfect for smart little girls.

Calvin and Hobbes, Marsupilami, The Smurfs, Superlopez, Asterix, Gaston, Spirou, Lucky luke, Zipi y Zape, Rompetechos, Mortadelo y Filemón, El botones sacarino, Tintin...

I loved Asterix comics as a kid, but my all-time favourites were the Commando comics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_%28comics%29

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