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African comic strips are here to stay, and are read, sold and available in many different formats: vignettes in daily papers, full-page comic strips in magazines, albums, compilations, joint albums and so on. They are published in French, English, Portuguese, Arabic and local languages. They cover a variety of genres, from storytelling and oral narratives to biography, educational material, comedy, history and religion (stories from the Bible, biography and hagiography). This article looks schematically into the presence of African comic strips in the French-speaking African countries, introducing the main players (Part 1) and describing the processes involved in their production (Part 2).