American Comics Should RanXerox European Comics

When I first started reading the adventures of Lieutenant Blueberry, I thought I had the story figured out from the first page. Because of my time reading American comics, I expected this to be a light-hearted, child friendly, adventure story about the cool guy, Blueberry, getting kidnapped and finding violently tame ways of escaping the Indians grasp. I know in the grand scheme of things what happens next is still tame, but seeing Blueberry tied down about to be tortured in conjunction with his panicked thought bubble proclaiming “Shit!” as he looks for a way to buy more time surprised me more than any of the adult comics I was reading in weeks prior. It was something so subtle, so small, but seeing this family friendly action hero do anything above a “Damn” made me see though that these comics were not gonna be what I was used to from American comics.
Overall I get the feeling there’s always been a place for more adult stories in European comics, with the problem of censorship not being nearly as much of an issue. Where I see this the most strongly is with Ranxerox, a beautifully, brutally, illustrated work about a robot beating its way through the streets to find its owner (or something along those lines, I was too busy staring at the lusciously detailed artwork to process much beyond it). This was clearly a published work, meaning the graphic content depicted in the story was allowed for distribution publicly in 1978. To put that into perspective, Maus was released two years after Ranxerox, meaning the Europeans were further ahead on what could be shown in a comic book than Americans. If this is what the adult comics, Air Pirate Funnies, Mr. Natural, and Zap! of yesteryear were fighting to produce, then I am beyond appreciative for their contribution to the comic book industry.  Ranxerox is what I look for in an adult story, something with language, sex, and violence, while still showing a world beyond that content. It doesn’t just serve as the punchline of a joke, it’s used to give the viewer a lens into the bizarre, futuristic world Ranxerox takes place in and because we’re informed of the setting, the world of Ranxerox feels like a living, breathing world people inhabit. It’s a work I wish I could have known about sooner since any less time spend with it would be depriving myself of “art”
Stories like the ones above remind me of how much a bubble American society puts itself in. Sure there are occasional foreign properties that make their way to states and get popular (the Pokemon boom of the early 2000’s comes to mind), but a lot of the other products are left completely by the wayside. It’s hard to say for sure without much knowledge of the comic industry, but I get this feeling even the comics of today could learn something from Lieutenant Blueberry, Ranxerox, and the other European stories that didn’t make it stateside popularly speaking. Perhaps it is less a problem with quantity as it is that most of the adult that do come into being just don’t get popular enough to be seen by the majority of audiences. Maybe in Europe these type of stories are just the standard, either way if more stories like that came stateside and got popular, comics could go beyond its current niche of children and middle aged adults.