Comic Book
📝 First Impressions
The Smurfs were part of my childhood long before I ever picked up one of their comic books.
I first discovered them on Romanian television in the early 1990s, and I loved them. That little blue community hidden away from the human world, the mushroom houses, Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Gargamel and Azrael — all of it became instantly familiar in the way only childhood cartoons really can.
So when I eventually came across the We Are the Smurfs books, I was never approaching them as someone meeting these characters for the first time.
I already knew them.
More importantly, I already loved them.
That inevitably changes the reading experience. There is a kind of comfort in opening a comic and immediately recognising a world that has been sitting somewhere in your memory for decades. Even before considering the stories themselves, seeing the Smurfs again brought back that feeling of watching them on television when I was a child.
The four books I read — Welcome to Our Village!, Better Together!, Bright New Days! and Our Brave Ways! — are clearly aimed at younger readers, and I certainly wasn’t expecting complicated plots or anything particularly profound from them.
That wasn’t why I wanted to read them.
I wanted to spend some time with the Smurfs again.
And sometimes nostalgia is more than enough reason to pick up a book.
What surprised me was how easily these little stories still worked for me as an adult. They are colourful, gentle and funny, but underneath the simplicity there is also that familiar emphasis on friendship, community, helping one another and figuring out how to live together despite everyone having very different personalities.
They are unmistakably children’s comics.
But for me, they also felt like a small trip back to something I had loved more than thirty years earlier.
💜 What I Loved
The biggest strength of these four books is simply how recognisably Smurfy they are.
They never feel as though the characters have been reinvented for a completely different generation or turned into something unnecessarily complicated. The humour is simple, the adventures are light, and the village still revolves around that wonderfully chaotic collection of personalities who somehow manage to function as a community.
And that is probably what I have always loved most about the Smurfs.
They are all essentially variations on the same tiny blue person, yet their personalities make them immediately distinguishable. One is brave, another grumpy, another clever, another clumsy, another convinced that his particular talent is the most important thing in the world. Put them together and even the smallest problem can become an adventure.
Across Welcome to Our Village!, Better Together!, Bright New Days! and Our Brave Ways!, I particularly enjoyed that emphasis on the village as a community. These are not stories about one heroic character constantly saving everybody else. The Smurfs argue, misunderstand one another, make mistakes and occasionally create their own problems, but eventually they have to cooperate.
There is something genuinely comforting about that.
The books also understand their audience very well. They are bright, expressive and extremely easy to follow, without feeling completely empty. The messages about friendship, courage, cooperation and accepting other people’s differences are obvious enough for younger readers without turning every story into a lecture.
As an adult reader, I obviously wasn’t reading these comics because I needed to discover the moral of the story. I was reading them because I love the Smurfs, and these books gave me exactly the kind of warm, familiar experience I wanted.
I also loved the artwork. The colourful panels, exaggerated expressions and instantly recognisable village made the books feel alive, and there were plenty of moments when simply looking at the characters made me smile. There is a particular visual charm to the Smurfs that has survived remarkably well over the decades.
Perhaps nostalgia was doing some of the work here — actually, I’m sure it was.
But I don’t think that diminishes the enjoyment at all.
Sometimes returning to characters you loved as a child and discovering that they can still make you happy is part of the pleasure of reading. And with these four books, that feeling was there almost immediately.
🤔 What Didn’t Quite Work for Me
Because all four books are aimed at younger readers, there is inevitably a certain amount of repetition.
The stories are short, the conflicts are usually resolved fairly quickly, and the lessons are often easy to see coming. Reading one volume at a time, that probably wouldn’t bother me at all. Reading several close together, though, I did occasionally feel the formula.
There are only so many times the Smurfs can misunderstand each other, make a mess of something and then rediscover the value of teamwork before the pattern becomes noticeable.
I also think that my enjoyment came more from the characters and the nostalgia than from the individual plots themselves. I remember the overall warmth of these books much more clearly than I remember specific storylines, which probably says quite a lot.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism of what the books are trying to do. They are children’s comics, and they do that job very well.
But as an adult reader, I wasn’t particularly surprised by anything.
The humour is gentle rather than hilarious, the conflicts are safe, and the emotional stakes are deliberately small. There were moments when I wanted just a little more depth or unpredictability, even though I knew perfectly well that this series was never really designed to provide that.
So for me, the weaker parts weren’t really failures.
They were mostly the natural limitations of reading something created primarily for children when you’re coming to it as an adult with decades of reading experience behind you.
And fortunately, the charm of the Smurfs was strong enough that I didn’t mind very much.
👥 Who Would Enjoy This Book
These books are an easy recommendation for younger readers who enjoy colourful, funny stories with familiar characters and straightforward adventures.
They would work especially well for children who are just beginning to read comics independently. The stories are accessible, the artwork carries a lot of the action, and the plots are simple enough to follow without becoming boring or overly repetitive within a single volume.
They are also a lovely choice for families who already know the Smurfs from television or films. There is something very easy about sharing characters that parents or grandparents may have grown up with and introducing them to a new generation.
And, clearly, they are not only for children.
If you grew up watching the Smurfs and still have a soft spot for them, these books can be pure comfort reading. You are probably not going to discover a complicated new side of the Smurf universe, but you may get exactly what I did: a cheerful little dose of nostalgia and the pleasure of spending time with characters you already love.
Readers looking for sophisticated storytelling, darker themes or complex character development will obviously need to look elsewhere.
But if what you want is something light, warm, colourful and unmistakably Smurfy, this collection does the job very nicely.
💭 Final Thoughts
Reading these four We Are the Smurfs books was never really about discovering something new for me.
It was about returning to something familiar.
I first knew the Smurfs from television when I was a child, so these characters have been sitting somewhere in the background of my memory for more than thirty years. Opening these comics brought back that same little world almost instantly: the mushroom houses, the constant squabbling, Papa Smurf trying to keep everybody under control, and that strange little community where absolutely everyone has a personality strong enough to cause trouble sooner or later.
Welcome to Our Village!, Better Together!, Bright New Days! and Our Brave Ways! are simple books, but I don’t think they need to be anything else.
They are cheerful, colourful and comforting. They tell small stories about friendship, courage, cooperation and learning to live with other people — or, in this case, other Smurfs — even when they annoy you enormously.
As an adult, I could obviously see the formulas and predict where many of the stories were going. But I also found that I didn’t particularly care.
Sometimes reading is about complexity, originality and being completely surprised by a story.
And sometimes it is simply about opening a book and finding characters who make you smile because you have loved them since you were a child.
For me, these four books were very much the second kind of reading experience.
They reminded me why I liked the Smurfs in the first place, and I finished them with exactly the feeling I had hoped for: not amazement, not some profound revelation, but warmth, familiarity and the very pleasant sense of having spent a little more time in that tiny blue village again.
✨ The BookFairy Verdict
We Are the Smurfs Books 1–4
📖 Book Details
Series: We Are the Smurfs
Creator: Peyo
Publisher: Abrams
Format: Paperback
Genre: Children’s Comics / Graphic Novels
Language: English
Illustrations: Full colour throughout
Books reviewed:
#1 – Welcome to Our Village!
Publication: 25 May 2023
Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 9781419755385
ISBN-10: 1419755382
#2 – Better Together!
Publication: 20 July 2023
Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 9781419755408
ISBN-10: 1419755404
#3 – Bright New Days!
Publication: 23 May 2024
Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 9781419755422
ISBN-10: 1419755420
#4 – Our Brave Ways!
Publication: 13 February 2025
Pages: 112
ISBN-13: 9781419771033
ISBN-10: 1419771035
🇷🇴 Romanian Editions
The Smurfs have also been published in Romanian as Ștrumfii, with a number of individual stories available from Editura Arthur.
However, the four We Are the Smurfs volumes reviewed here do not appear to have been published in Romanian in the same collected format. The Romanian editions available from Arthur are separate Smurfs stories rather than direct editions of these four omnibus volumes.
For that reason, I am not listing a Romanian equivalent for each of the books above.
🛒 Buy the Book
If the We Are the Smurfs series sounds like your kind of read, you can support BookFairy by purchasing the books through the links below. It won’t cost you anything extra, and using these links helps support the site while allowing me to continue creating honest, independent book reviews.
📚 Waterstones
📚 Browse Smurfs books at Waterstones
📦 Amazon UK
📗 Welcome to Our Village! — Paperback
📗 Better Together! — Paperback
📗 Bright New Days! — Paperback
