Stock American film themes—science-fiction, detective stories, Westerns—were domesticated in stylized European versions. Millions of West Germans learned about cowboys from paperback novels written by local authors who had never been to America; by 1960 German-language ‘Western’ novels were selling at the rate of ninety-one million a year in the Federal Republic alone. The second most popular European cartoon character after the Belgian boy-detective Tintin was another Belgian product: Lucky Luke, a hapless and appealing cowpoke featured weekly in French- and Dutch-language comics. America,
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