He did, he had a back up feature in Mystery Comics Digest #5, of which he was not the main feature or mentioned on the cover, and was featured again in Mystery Comics Digest #10 and #11 in which he was a narrator for a back up stories(again, not featured on the covers in text or image) before gaining his own feature later.

Very efficient. You've managed to offer commentary on my Day 1 and 11 picks in one go!

Why waste words when you don't need to?

Fixed that for you.

Goodness! Is it that late already?

#12. The Smurfs



The famous blue gnomes took their first steps in a 1958 Johan & Pirlouit adventure, "La flûte à six trous" (The six hole flute), which was later retitled "La flûte à six Schtroumpfs". A movie inspired by the comic would be produced in 1975 and I can't believe that it's almost been fifty years. (Cripes, I just realized that I still consider that film a "kinda new one", but it preceded Star Wars by two years! I'm old).

"Schtroumpf", the Smurfs' name in the original French stories, is actually the phonetic rendering of the German word Strumpf, which means "sock". Creator Peyo found the word amusing, according to certain reports.

The Smurfs were at first just a plot device; they lived in the Accursed Land, in which the medieval heroes Johan and Pirlouit found themselves during the course of one of their adventures. The Smurfs proved so popular that they made an encore appearance in a later book and graduated to their own series, with "Les Schtroumpfs noirs", the Smurf version of a zombie plague. Johan & Pirlouit would see their star wane (which is a pity as I really liked the series) but the Smurfs would grow in popularity, getting more albums, t-shirts and latex figurines, until they became true superstars thanks to American cartoons.

Peyo and his studio published over a dozen Smurfs volumes over the next few decades. The first ones were really good, before the whole concept became a franchise. After that, well... we got the usual made-by-committee kind of stuff, interspersed with a few good ideas when some old fan would get their hands on the creative reins. (Peyo died in the early '90s). The early Smurfs stories ranged from straight humorous fantasy adventure in the Bone vein to slightly disguised sociological or political metaphors; another example of European comics made for kids but suitable for adults for different reasons. 

The concept was hard not to like, due to its simplicity and potential. The Smurfs live in a village with houses shaped like big mushrooms (they're real houses, not emptied mushrooms), a village that nobody can find even after having visited it. They speak a language in which names, verbs and adjectives can be replaced by the word "smurf" apparently at random (and one story describes the linguistic cleavage that brought two parts of the village to blows: should one say "a smurdriver" or a screwsmurfer"?) Their medieval world has wizards, dragons, ogres and the like.

There were 99 Smurfs when the series began, and that actually caused a problem when time came for the once-in-a-century dance of the moon, which requires 100. A new Smurf was magically brought into existence by a process involving a mirror, leading to a good story about a Smurf who was the enantiomer of another. All the Smurfs are males, which led their arch-foe, Gargamel, to create a female Smurf in the hope of having them all fight to gain her attention. (That's where the Smurfette came from).

Smurfs mostly all look alike, except for a few: Papa Smurf, their father figure and leader, looks older (he wears a white beard) and is dressed in red. Papa Smurf is also an alchemist of no small talent. The moralizing Smurf, meanwhile, wears spectacles and keeps annoying people with his preaching. All the other Smurfs have the same look despite having different personalities. (The cartoons introduced different designs that eventually made it into the comics but I don't view them as canonical).

The series was attacked by representatives of the perpetually-offended crowd on a few occasions. For example, some thought that Gargamel, the evil wizard with a Rabelaisian name, was an anti-semitic caricature. Considering that there is nothing whatsoever linking Gargamel to Judaism, any such claims are ridiculous and say more about the accused than about the character. People see evil everywhere, it seems, even in innocuous stories about little forest gnomes!

The first few Smurf adventures are definitely worth reading. And they were but a spin-off to begin with!

However, I would argue the New Warriors series he speaks of in the very post is eligible, the team having been introduced in Thor.