Comics are serious business in the land of Tintin and The Smurfs, and nowhere more so than in Europe's biggest and oldest museum dedicated to the art form as the venue celebrates its 25th birthday.

Enter the Belgium Comic Strip Centre and you pass a giant model of the red and white moon rocket used by the ginger-quiffed boy detective, along with other life-size replicas from other famed comics.

Located in a stunning Art Nouveau warehouse in central Brussels, it's clear that here comics, graphic novels, bandes desinees, call them what you will, are more high art than popular culture.

But if anything, the challenge for the museum over the past quarter century is to make sure that things don't get too serious, and that the element of wonder that has drawn children to Tintin, Snowy and friends is not lost.

"In 2014 we're trying to support what comics have become. We don't want to get tied up in the idea that a museum has to be an art gallery," museum director Jean Auquier said at an event to mark the 25th anniversary.

A party to celebrate the big day drew a crowd of well-heeled members of Brussels high society, including a few surviving contemporaries of Tintin's creator, Herge, who died in 1983.

The museum is a major draw for tourists too - for many of whom comic strips are as much of a national symbol of Belgium as beer or chocolate - and is the country's seventh most visited monument.

It attracts 200,000 visitors a year, more than double the number who visit a new, dedicated Tintin museum in the leafy new university town of Louvain-la-Neuve, some 20 kilometers outside Brussels.

Most come from France (40 percent), Belgium (17.5 percent), Germany (5 percent) and Spain (4 percent) - but 3 percent come from as far as China.

The museum is designed for all ages too, with a new section dedicated to the artist Pierre Culliford, who under the pen name Peyo created The Smurfs in the late 1950s. It features a giant mushroom of the kind that makes the home for the small blue creatures.

In the comics library, visitors can read their favorite strips all day long for 50 euro cents (62 US cents).

The top floor - overlooking the hall which is dominated by a huge model of the red bellboy's cap worn by Belgian comic favorite Spirou - is given over to temporary exhibitions.

AFP