There's Herge then there is Moebius....
Here is a portion of an article retrieved from http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2011/06/07/the_ninth_art.html
This might help to explain the stylistic genre Moebius was a part of.
The bande dessinée, often called simply BD, is not just popular, however. It is also widely accepted as a legitimate art—the “ninth art”, according to a term used since the 1960s. It’s been enshrined as such in the Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angoulême, a cultural center that includes a museum, the Musée de la Bande Dessinée, along with a specialized library, a bookstore and a cinema. The museum is designated as a Musée de France, putting it in the same category as the Louvre—which, as it happens, held an exhibition of BD in 2009 in connection with the comics publisher Futuropolis. “It’s hard to think of a more striking example of how the French have embraced BD as an art form than putting it in the Louvre,” says Vessels.
Nor was that exhibit unique. In October 2010, the Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Le Havre examined the “new scene of equality” between BD and contemporary art, while an exhibit called Archi & BD at the very serious Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine in the Palais de Chaillot focused on architecture as portrayed in comics. And the first solo exhibition of Moebius, the pseudonym of artist Jean Giraud (also sometimes known as Gir), famous for the western serial Blueberry and the science-fiction Arzach, ran for six months at the Fondation Cartier, through March 2011.
“Bande dessinée has ever greater recognition as a genuine visual art,” says Futuropolis editorial director Sébastien Gnaedig. This legitimacy, he says, is probably due in large part to the fact that comics in France have long ceased to be solely aimed at children and adolescents. Of course, there’s always been much for adults to enjoy in the likes of Astérix: take Astérix’s duel with a Roman soldier in the style of Cyrano de Bergerac in Le Cadeau de César—converted into Hamlet fighting Laertes in the English version, Caesar’s Gift. Or consider the Roman official Saugrenus in Obélix and Company, a parody of the prime minister of the time, Jacques Chirac. (The French word saugrenu means preposterous or ridiculous.) But in the 1960s and 1970s, magazines such as Hara-Kiri, L’Écho des Savanes, Métal Hurlant (cofounded by Moebius) and A Suivre helped firmly establish that BD could also be aimed explicitly at adults. “It was like a revolution that saw comics come to be taken more seriously,” explains Willem De Graeve, curator at the Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels.