Franco-Belgian comics

Impact and popularity

Franco-Belgian comics have been translated in most European languages, with some of them enjoying a worldwide success. Some magazines, aside from the Dutch-language editions, have been translated in Greek, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, while in other cases foreign magazines were filled with the best of the Franco-Belgian comics. In France and Belgium, most magazines have since then disappeared or have a largely reduced circulation for socio-economic reasons (but mostly because modern readership no longer possesses the patience to read their comics in weekly or monthly instalments, instead preferring to have a story presented to them wholesale in album format), but the number of published and sold albums stays relatively high – the majority of new titles being currently directly published as albums without prior magazine serialisation – with the biggest successes still on the juvenile and adolescent markets. This state of affairs has been mirrored in the other European countries as well. As a format, the Franco-Belgian comic has been near-universally adopted by native comic artists all over Europe, especially in the neighbouring countries of Belgium and France (and including Italy, despite that country having had a rich and thriving comics culture of its own and with the Netherlands as an early adopter being one of the first, if not the first, to do so), solidifying the position of the Franco-Belgian comic as the preeminent force on the European comics scene, Great Britain excepted.