Beetle Bailey was published as a comic book in the U.S., from, I looked it up, 1962 until 1980. I started off pretty sure it had been in formats beyond the newspaper funnies because some paperbacks were around the house when I was a kid.
As far as I can tell, those were larger books collecting the strips in chronological order and/or by theme rather than traditional comic books in magazine form. Those are common for most of the more popular US newspaper strips. There's even a common, distinct, size/format for them - I have a bunch of different ones on my bookshelf, though not Beetle Bailey.
They're very different from the format I have in mind, as they're published much more rarely (as the magazines often only need a handful of new pages per issue, and supplement with re-runs and side-series), in book form rather than magazine form, and rarely sold outside of specialist comic book stores or book stores. The chronological book editions are more aimed for collectors than for casual readers, with conversely tiny print runs in comparison.
We get the chronological collections for collectors in Norway too, but they're relegated to the same role as in the US (Asterix got the most fantastic collectors edition back in the 80's: You could get all of the ones published by then in hardcover on extra heavy paper, with gilded edges, bound in wild boar skin...).
Read the text at the link I provided. Especially the second paragraph. And notice that the panels there would be 3 weeks of Sundays for a pretty simple gag.
There's anyway lots of not so super U.S. comics, stuff like "Archie" or "Duck Tales" would be big ones. I sort of wonder how much U.S. stuff is being recycled into the books you are talking about. I don't mean I think it is for sure happening, I actually mean I wonder about how much it happens.
Sorry, I missed that bit - I just briefly skimmed through the pages and noticed I recognized a couple of them. There is also a big series of collections of the newspaper strips that continued at least up until 1993, according to Wikipedia, and I assumed this was simply one of those. But yes, that's clearly different.
> There's anyway lots of not so super U.S. comics, stuff like "Archie" or "Duck Tales" would be big ones.
There's lots of them, but they are "special interest" that are published in tiny little runs for the most part, and most of them don't get much retail distribution (at least not any more). Archie being the closest to an extant "mainstream" non-superhero series (Archie is also reprinted in Scandinavia, but has never been a big seller), but even Archie is tiny: The main Archie title sold for <30k/month as of a few years ago.
Duck Tales is an interesting one to bring up, as it belongs to a separate tradition: The cartoon spin-off. There's lots of them, but most of them don't sell very well, and few of them get translated much. The Duck Tales stories do get published in Scandinavia, but as far as I understand they sell tiny amounts compared to the weekly Donald & Co magazine.
> I sort of wonder how much U.S. stuff is being recycled into the books you are talking about. I don't mean I think it is for sure happening, I actually mean I wonder about how much it happens.
Most of it does, for any series that gains traction. There are certainly US series that doesn't make it (but the US editions will be for sale in any comic shop), but for the ones that do, pretty much every single thing that gets printed in the US makes it to the European editions. E.g. Beetle Bailey has been published about monthly from the mid 70's in Norway, increasing to 3 times a month in the 80's, and twice a week for about the last 20 years - they've published every little scrap of Bettle Bailey material they've managed to dig up, and still the magazine is mostly re-runs and side series, and this is fairly typical.
Usually the death-knell for these magazines is that they simply "run dry". Calvin and Hobbes for example, kept going for a few years after Watterson stopped drawing, but unlike Beetle Bailey, his ten year run was simply too short to give them the same kind of flexibility in ongoing extensive re-runs, as the target audience would know and remember almost everything they'd print.
On top of publishing whatever they can get from the US editions the European publishers often commission extra material to help fill the generally higher page count editions, or special additional series. E.g. there's a long standing "Donald Pocket" series where the majority of books are written specifically for various European regional markets by European artists. And the Scandinavian Donald magazines includes a lot of specially commissioned stories from artists like Don Rosa (US) that are often not published in the US because there's no outlet for them (Don Rosa have had a few stories published in US comic books, but the US Disney comics sales keeps imploding every few years leading to repeated mass cancellations)
To get back to Beetle Bailey, there's another interesting example: The Scandinavian magazines regularly publishes draft strips that Walker or his assistants found too rude to expect to be accepted by his US publisher due to language (sexual innuendo, bodily functions etc.) or nudity.
Here's an example:
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2011/04/16/the-comi...
I guess other funnies may have had similar runs.