When I was a little kid and my career Air Force father was transferred to Germany in the mid 50s, we visited my aunt and cousin in France. He had a bunch of French language comic books that were extremely popular with kids called "Spirou" (pronounced spee-roo). Some of the characters were a variety of little blue people with stocking caps. Instead of Smurfs, they were called "Les Schtroumpfs" which is a funny sounding German name in French that I believe means stocking. I'd heard that the rights to the characters were later purchased for the U.S.

Yes, they're Belgian-French or possibly Franco-Belgian as are a lot of great comic books that are massively popular most everywhere in the world except for in the US, which seems to prefer Superheroes. I think they deserve to be better known here, though

Off the top of my head:


Asterix


Ric Hochet


Tintin


Michel Vaillant


Lucky Luke

Lol.