exploration of more mature themes. As a result, comics from these companies included a greater relative number of LGBT characters and storylines than their more traditional competitors. LGBT superhero characters include Spectral and Turbo Charge (from Malibu comics), and Gen13's Sarah Rainmaker (created by Wildstorm for Image Comics before being taken over by DC). Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil, dating back to the black-and-white independent movement of the 1980s, and published by Image since 1996, featured openly gay characters as the romantic leads that gained the series a Gaylactic Spectrum Award nomination. Dark Horse's Buffy the Vampire Slayer-related comics feature the lesbian characters of Willow, Tara and Kennedy and the closeted character Andrew from the television series. The Buffy Season Eight comics attracted media attention when the title character has a one-night stand with another girl who had fallen in love with her. The encounter was repeated, but both the character and the creators denied that this made Buffy gay, with Joss Whedon saying: "We're not going to make her gay, nor are we going to take the next 50 issues explaining that she's not. She's young and experimenting, and did I mention open-minded?" Mainstream European comics Comics from continental Europe have been described as having a greater range of "themes, narratives and forms of visual impact" than English-language comics, but have been superseded in popularity by American comics since the mid-1980s, with only French comics matching the popularity of Japanese and American comics. The lack of a "comics code" equivalent to the US system has made the incorporation of LGBT themes less controversial. This is exemplified by the Kelly Green graphic novels (1982–93), created by Stan Drake and Leonard Starr. Drake and Starr are American cartoonists who chose to publish in France, where they would not be limited by US censorship and "could write and draw anything they wanted"; this included episodes in which the vigilante title character dresses as a boy to lure a gay villain into an ambush, and a stereotypically gay secondary character who ran a strip-club. At the beginning of the 20th century, French and Belgian comic strips ("Bande Dessinée") had become regarded as a medium for children – this restricted their inclusion of adult and sexual themes, and lasted until at least the 1960s. However, early Franco-Belgian comics for children such as The Adventures of Tintin, Asterix,liberation.fr and The Adventures of Alix have also