The Smurfs are a result of chance by the comic artist Peyo who was at first surprised by the huge success of his creation. Soon, he got quite annoyed by his achievement because it kept him from concentrating on other projects. One shall be relatively familiar with the Smurfs so I won't spend time about explaining who these little creatures are.

It might seem a bit irretating, but also their child-oriented design does not protect the Smurfs from censorship. Compared are the uncensored German edition with the censored American edition.

Re-coloring of the Smurfs

The first issue of the comic series was not available in the USA for a long time. The reason for that was the title story "The Purple Smurfs" that was named quite differently than the German editon ("Blue Smurfs And Black Smurfs"). In this story, a childlike version of "Zombie Holocaust" (where the Smurfs enter a zombie-like state due to a sickness) is told.

But this was not the main reason for the censorship but the fact that the infected Smurfs turned black. The extremely far-fetched accusation of racism was raised because of this and therefore, this volume was never released in English.

But in September 2010, a release in the USA did finally happen. The publisher "Papercutz" re-colored all the originally black Smurfs to purple and the title was changed to "The Purple Smurfs".

German edition	US edition

Interesting trivia: This was NOT the first censorship of this material. In 1981, the comic was also produced as a cartoon and all the black Smurfs were re-colored to purple as well (the series was produced in the USA).