Confusing “available in English” with “worldwide success”

Earlier this week, Tom Spurgeon linked to an article in The Irish Times on French comics and their supposed failure to become a success abroad:

Perhaps the chief reason for this relative obscurity is that the festival celebrates a cultural product that has, to date, stubbornly resisted any and all attempts to export it. Unlike cinema, or jazz, or any of the other artistic endeavours for which France is regularly feted, Francophone comics have, for reasons mysterious, never quite managed to “cross over” and translate local mass-popularity into success on an international stage.

There are, of course, exceptions – most notably the peerless Franco-Belgian duo of Asterix and Tintin, two series that have conquered minds and markets both regional and global. Yet for all their success, these venerable titans represent but the uppermost tip of a thriving, prolific and progressive creative iceberg.

Which is only true if you define “success on an international stage” as “popular in the UK, US and/or other English speaking countries”. It’s true that Franco-Belgian comics have done badly in English, but that doesn’t go for the rest of Europe, or large parts of the rest of the non-English speaking world. That this sort of success is invisible in the Anglo-American parts of the world is due to the failure of the former to pay much attention to anything outside its own borders, rather than due to the lack of this success.