Yeah.

The US certainly know of the Smurfs, but to them they're mostly cartoon characters and it's from them they know them, like Tintin incidentally. They're nowhere as familiar with the albums, or the bédé magazines as we are.

The US comics culture is also very different from the bédé culture. Not the same audience at all, not the same general cultural importance either. Generations of us almost literarally grew up on Belgian bédé. Characters like Tintin, Astérix, les Schtroumpfs, Spirou, Johan et Pirlouit, Lucky Luke, Gaston Lagaffe, Achille Talon (and many of the "lesser" known ones like Yoko Tsuno etc.) easily compete in popularity with the Disney characters, or the Looney Tunes, and are in a completely different league than superheroes Superman, Hulk, Captain America and co. If anything, their true "rivals" (if they can be called that, it was mostly through cartoons they arrived to us) since the 80s or so were rather Japanese characters (and their manga counterparts became popular and truly rivalled European bédé in the francophone market only later. And though manga sell significantly more in France or Québec (and I would guess, Belgium as well) than they do in the US, I doubt they really rival the golden age Belgian bédé characters in popularity and awareness, among adults anyway).