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.
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.