I'm not so sure that's true for the twenties and thirties. - Edit 1
Before modification by Legolas at 02/12/2011 11:51:01 PM
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
At least, I recall seeing evidence of American comics being somewhat known in Belgium around that time, not long ago, but I can't remember where.
It's hard to search very specifically on the internet for things like this, but see for instance this paragraph, from the French Wikipedia article on the magazine Spirou, emphasis mine (the year is 1938 ):
"L'idée de la création du journal Spirou naît dans la tête de Jean Dupuis, un imprimeur belge de Marcinelle qui depuis les années 1920 s'est lancé dans la presse, avec notamment les journaux Le Moustique, spécialisé dans les programmes radios nationales et Bonne soirée, un journal féminin spécialisé dans le roman. Pour diversifier encore un peu plus son lectorat, il a l'idée de créer un journal pour la jeunesse. [b]La bande dessinée américaine inondent alors la Belgique, au travers de magazines publiés en France[/b]. Jean Dupuis, catholique pratiquant et fortement européen, trouvant que ces histoires ne coïncident pas avec la morale et le souci éducatif qu'il défend, charge son fils ainé, Paul, de trouver le profil idéal d'un journal pour la jeunesse."
"Inondent" (sic) seems to suggest rather more than simply "somewhat known", so I may actually have understated the case, though here and elsewhere it is suggested the popularity of American comics came only in the later thirties in Belgium/France.
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).
Agreed with this, and it was much the same for me. Superman and Batman were exclusively movie characters for me growing up (and I hadn't even seen any of them).
This is supported by the near absence of any influence of the American superheroes on the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (and vice versa).
There was some influencing in both directions, notably by icons like Moebius, but yeah, not too much...
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.).
Maybe Belgium is different, but the attraction of manga seems modest here, compared to what you describe and what I see in the US... the only group I'm aware of who is into anime or manga are my Japanese Studies friends, and they have a tendency of being highly America-oriented in terms of pop culture as well as (obviously) fascinated by Japan, so they get it from both directions. Our bookstores - Fnac, say, which after all is a French chain - do have manga, but it doesn't seem to sell much, and I'm certainly not seeing too much manga influence in the local comics.