International influences

European comics were the first to make an impression. Of course, 'Europe' is a big place, and we are really talking about several traditions. In France, for example, comics were christened 'BDs' or 'bandes dessinees', a term for 'drawn strips'; Spanish comics, or 'tebeos' take their name from TBO, one of the founding picture papers; the Italians call them 'fumetti', literally 'little smokes', after their visualization of speech balloons. What is important about these various terminologies is that none of them are loaded in the same way that 'comics' is in Britain and America.
Historically speaking, the biggest and most important comics character was Belgian, and had his origins in the 1920s, though his success in the anglophone markets dates from the 1950s. We are talking, of course, about Tintin: a creation whose recognition factor worldwide today ranks with Disney's top characters, and whose adventures continue to far outsell those of any other European title.
Tintin was created in 1929 by Georges Remi, who signed his work 'Herge', and began life in a pull-out newspaper supplement designed for children. The character was essentially a boy scout, dressed in plus fours, who gets into scrapes in exotic locations - Africa, the Far East, South America and even the moon. There was certainly humour in the stories, mostly revolving around his friend Captain Haddock, the fearless seafarer, and Snowy, his trusty white dog. In essence, however, they were adventures, ostensibly 'innocent' but often with right-wing sub-texts; there was some controversy during and just after the war over whether Herge was a Nazi sympathiser.