Children read Asterix and Tin-Tin, but French adults are seriously into comic books too. The market is enormous. Over 800 are published each year and more than 21 million are sold annually. ‘Les Bandes Dessinées’,which translates as ‘drawn strips’, is used to describe them rather than comic books.They are read by professionals and the middle-classes. In fact 40% of French people regularly buy them. A friend of ours has written one about the history of champagne. I think a British person would say that the last comic they read was when they were in junior school.