EUROPEAN COMICS 189
decades, culminating in the creation of comics museums (in Brussels, Angoulême,
Lisbon, Groningen, Lucca). In the same period, comics developed commercially by intro-
ducing more and more merchandising and spin-off s, such as animation series or games.
Th e publishing houses that started on a small scale as a family enterprise merged into
bigger international conglomerates. For instance, three important francophone publishers
(Dargaud, Lombard, and Dupuis) became part of Média-Participations and today they
occupy more than one-third of the French comics market. Not everybody was pleased
with the tremendous concentration of media ownership and its consequences (decreasing
variety in products): artists and fans founded small publishing houses as an alternative
to mainstream publishing, such as L’Association in France and Frigo in Belgium. Often,
these small, alternative publishers loathed the practices of mainstream publishers (e.g.,
continuing a series after the death of the original author; ruthless merchandising, etc.)
and advocated a freer artistic approach.
Th ough Japanese manga already arrived in Switzerland and Italy in the late 1970s,
it is only from the 1990s on that various local European comics markets (especially
in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany) were fl ooded with translated Japanese comics.
Th ough again, the situation can diff er very much from country to country: for instance
in the Dutch region (the Netherlands and Flanders) manga are still rather absent
because very few are translated.
Th is all makes the situation nowadays in Europe quite complicated. While some
series (Lucky Luke, Tex Willer, Dylan Dog, Astérix, Mortadelo y Filemón, Storm, Th orgal,
XIII) are internationally distributed and read, many other series still remain a national
or even regional phenomenon. In the former Yugoslavia, the Croats, Serbs, and
Slovenians create their own comics; in the Flemish North and the francophone South
of Belgium, to a considerable extent, diff erent comics are produced and consumed. In
some countries (such as France or Belgium), comics may form an integral and respected
part of the national and even offi cial culture, while in other European regions (such
as Greece or the Baltic countries) comics remain a marginal cultural form. In general,
one will fi nd more comics in Western Europe than in the former East-European sector
(with the exception of the former Yugoslavia, which once had a vibrant and profi table
comics culture). After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union
comics markets of former Communist Bloc countries changed very quickly: new pub-
lishers (with titles from around the world) entered the markets, but almost none of
them lasted; at the same time an alternative comic scene produced many fanzines such
as the Polish Produkt (1999–2004) and the Slovenian Stripburger (1992–).
In general, European comics culture was never isolated from American or East-Asian
production. Even in the 19th century, many North American comics were created by
artists with German roots (Dirks, Feininger), while the French artist Georges Fer-
dinand Bigot founded a bilingual French-Japanese comics magazine To b â é (1887) in
Japan. Similarly, after the disaster of World War II various Italian artists (such as Hugo
Pratt) emigrated to Argentina; various British comics authors (Neil Gaiman, Dave
Gibbons, Simon Bisley, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison) worked from the 1980s on for
