This work aims to cast a light on the French publishing system of comics strips, and includes French-speaking parts of Belgium and Switzerland. For decades, the history of comic strips was focused on thematical approaches and relies on a restricted canon. Our work studies the originality of french-speaking countries regarding the publication of comic strips from the 1950s to the 1980s, between the setting of a strong censorship to the upheaval of the 1990s. In the 1950s, the comic strips books, named ‘albums’ in France after children’s books, met great success, and by the mid-1970s these albums had become widespread in the comics industry, to the extent that traditional magazines are embrittled. This early and massive shift from one support to the other raises a lot of questions on the way the works of art are broadcasted and, on a broader level, how a publishing format transformed the meaning, the reading experience and the status of the comic strips, helping bande dessinée becoming the 9th art. Our works starts by focusing on the publishers, and analyses the cyclical movements of renewal of the comics industry in the beginning of the 1950s, in the mid-1970s and the end of the 1980s. Then we describe a variety of formats used to publish comic strips and we analyze the way it transformed narrative rhythms. Finally we study the numerous comic strips entrepreneurs who ruled reading practices: censors, librarians, booksellers, fans... Between the history of reading, material bibliography and the study of censorship, this study aims to propose new perspectives in the field of comics studies as well as book history.