Comic album in the context of "The Smurfs (comics)"

European comics are comics produced in Europe. The comic album is a very common printed medium. The typical album is printed in large format, generally with high quality paper and colouring, commonly 24 cm × 32 cm (9.4 in × 12.6 in), has around 48–60 pages, but examples with more than 100 pages are common. While sometimes referred to as graphic novels, this term is rarely used in Europe, and is not always applicable as albums often consist of separate short stories, placing them somewhere halfway between a comic book and a graphic novel. The European comic genres vary from the humorous adventure vein, such as The Adventures of Tintin and Asterix, to more adult subjects like Tex Willer, Diabolik, and Thorgal.

The Adventures of Tintin (French: Les Aventures de Tintin [lez‿avɑ̃tyʁ də tɛ̃tɛ̃]) is a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (pen name of Georges Remi). The series was one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century. By 2007, a century after Hergé's birth, Tintin had been published in more than 70 languages with sales of more than 200 million copies, and had been adapted for radio, television, theatre, and film.

The series first appeared in French on 10 January 1929 in Le Petit Vingtième, a youth supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. The success of the series led to serialised strips published in Belgium's leading newspaper Le Soir and spun into a successful Tintin magazine. In 1950, Hergé created Studios Hergé, which produced the canonical versions of ten Tintin albums. Following Hergé's death in 1983, the final instalment of the series, Tintin and Alph-Art, was released posthumously.

Asterix (French: Astérix or Astérix le Gaulois [asteʁiks lə ɡolwa], "Asterix the Gaul"; also known as Asterix and Obelix in some adaptations or The Adventures of Asterix) is a French comic album series about a Gaulish village which, thanks to a magic potion that enhances strength, resists the forces of Julius Caesar's Roman Republic Army in a nonhistorical telling of the time after the Gallic Wars. Many adventures take the titular hero Asterix and his friend Obelix to Rome and beyond.

The series first appeared in the Franco-Belgian comic magazine Pilote on 29 October 1959. It was written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo until Goscinny's death in 1977. Uderzo then took over the writing until 2009, when he sold the rights to publishing company Hachette; he died in 2020. In 2013, a new team consisting of Jean-Yves Ferri (script) and Didier Conrad (artwork) took over. As of 2025, 41 volumes have been released; the most recent was penned by new writer Fabcaro and released on 23 October 2025.

Willebrord Jan Frans Maria "Willy" Vandersteen (15 February 1913 – 28 August 1990) was a Belgian creator of comic books. In a career spanning 50 years, he created a large studio and published more than 1,000 comic albums in over 25 series, selling more than 200 million copies worldwide.

Considered together with Marc Sleen the founding father of Flemish comics, he is mainly popular in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Hergé called him "The Brueghel of the comic strip", while the creation of his own studio and the mass production and commercialization of his work turned him into "the Walt Disney of the Low Countries".

Tintin (French: Le Journal de Tintin; Dutch: Kuifje) was a weekly Belgian comics magazine of the second half of the 20th century. Subtitled "The Magazine for the Youth from 7 to 77", it was one of the major publications of the Franco-Belgian comics scene and published such notable series as Blake and Mortimer, Alix, and the principal title The Adventures of Tintin. Originally published by Le Lombard, the first issue was released in 1946, and it ceased publication in 1993.

Tintin magazine was part of an elaborate publishing scheme. The magazine's primary content focused on a new page or two from several forthcoming comic albums that had yet to be published as a whole, thus drawing weekly readers who could not bear to wait for entire albums. There were several ongoing stories at any given time, giving wide exposure to lesser-known artists. Tintin was also available bound as a hardcover or softcover collection. The content always included filler material, some of which was of considerable interest to fans, for example alternate versions of pages of the Tintin stories, and interviews with authors and artists. Not every comic appearing in Tintin was later put into book form, which was another incentive to subscribe to the magazine. If the quality of Tintin printing was high compared to American comic books through the 1970s, the quality of the albums was superb, utilizing expensive paper and printing processes (and having correspondingly high prices).