As far as I know, the American comics were very obscure in Francophone Europe before the Liberation. Like Jazz and black culture, like pulp fiction, like SF, chewing-gum and marlboro, comics were only brought to France by the American G.I.s

As far as I know, their incursion in France-Belgium didn't last much, unlike the rest. BD entered its golden age and that's pretty much all we knew/liked (it's the same in francophone Québec. My only exposure to superheroes were through animation and series on TV in the late seventies that didn't have much resonance with us. You couldn't find comics anywhere but at a few specialized stores in the anglophone areas of Montreal (it's still the case, by the way).

This is supported by the near absence of any influence of the American superheroes on the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (and vice versa).

I vaguely remember Eco speaking of this somewhere. I think he explained the comics were introduced in Italy through the American Italian community. Weren't those Italian adaptations technically "bootlegs" anyway?

Not to say that American animation wasn't popular. But the American cartoons to us were Hannah-Barbara, Disney, Looney Tunes (I grew only vaguely aware of characters like Superman - technically a Canadian superhero... Hulk and company ). Those were as huge as the Tintin or Asterix movies, and only a few years later Japanese anime like Albator, Goldorak, Candy and so on (the list is pretty long... I just have no idea what the titles of those are in English!) became our true memorable animated characters.. In print though, Europe held nearly all the market until the late 80s, when manga entered the picture. Nowadays, Franco-Belgian BD is still fairly strong, and there's a new wave of artists... who work in the Japanese style. The big publishers like Casterman also release a lot of Japanese titles these days (unlike the publishers specialized in Manga, mostly French, houses like Casterman and Dargaud publish their manga in the oversized formats typical of French and Belgian BD (they also cost a buck, because they have the Japanese artists redo all the layouts, so reading order is western. There's a cheap way to do it, but Casterman rather pays to have all the cases rearranged by the original artist and for the text to be placed differently (Most manga publishers simply got their readers used to the original Japanese order.).

There's a new interview with Eco I'll look for tonight (it's been published today.. somewhere... they talked about it on the radio. It is probably in French, though on that radio show it could actually be in any language as they often discuss the foreign press). I'll try to post a link here if it's in print and online (could well be in an American or English magazine too). I'll need to re listen to the show via their website to track it down.

It sounded extremely interesting the way they talked of it. He talks about "Queen Loanna" and his work as a novelist a lot in it (of his older novels, not a lot about the new one I think), if I heard right (I was a bit distracted by getting ready for work). He also talks of his ipad. He discusses his fascination with lies and how this underpins most of his work of fiction from the Name of the Rose to the Prague Cemetery.