It’s the style of European comics (bandes dessinées). To be even more precise, it’s a French-Belgium style. Those two countries have an awesome culture and history of "bandes dessinées" which is hardly comparable to manga or US comics. It’s much more fine humor and hidden criticism than heroes and incredible adventures.

Also, here it’s a magazine which will sometimes talk about hard or sad topics so I don’t think you want something too bright, a neutral style like shown here seems to be the most sensible choice.

I am fed up with cute characters and similarly beautiful looking people. Give me characters with flaws, that's how most humans are

People in France who buy Comics/BD have a completely different aesthetic sense than manga buyers. There is almost no overlap, and manga buyers I know do not even register Comics/BD as an option. Comic artists are also usually very much against the manga aesthetics and seem to go for (imho) ugly designs to differentiate themselves.

I know a lot of people who read both, it’s not some sort of mutually exclusive tastes. It’s just that they are really different products that only share the fact that they are a succession of drawings arranged to tell a story. Basically everything else is different.

Even assuming that is true, I believe that comics could be more successful if they changed their character designs to make them more appealing to look at.

I feel like historically french and belgium comic has a lot to do with caricature.

I remember reading a lot of comic where every character was actually ugly. The only exceptions were tintin and blake et mortimer (from my childhood comic selection obviously)

Not caricature. More like … realistic? Characters have flaws, like in the real worlds. Their body are tired and they experience real human emotions. It’s just more adult in general

In the topo magazine yes, it has a more realistic style, but still I feel like history is very different from manga, and it still have influence even on those realistic style sometime.

Like all comics like achille talon, asterix obelix, gaston lagaffe, boule et bill, cedric... Every character is exaggerated and not in flattering manner.

Oh, sorry.

I had adult graphic novel from the 2000’s onward in mind.

Etienne Davodeau & consorts for instance.”Les mauvaises gens”

As much as the French consume manga and other Japanese culture including anime, I think this is a more typical Western style, audiences of which may find normal Japanese cuteness to be over-the-top.

You should take a look at the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It's a fascinating book about how our brains interpret imagery through the study of comics. One of the best parts is when he explains how humans connect better with abstract imagery. For example, villains are often close to photorealistic while the characters the author wants us to identify with is often abstract. It's very counterintuitive and fascinating.

Except for Musk, everyone seems stylistically fairly cute. The textile workers all are simply drawn but cute, and the cover with the reclined man is odd but he's still attractive. So I'm guessing the artist isn't a huge fan of Musk.

The "everybody is cute" art style that modern manga and anime converged on is very ugly. It tracks with the degeneration of the audience; there used to be content made for all sorts of audiences but now it's all made for weirdo manchildren. This has been a trend starting with Japan's economic stagnation and getting worse every year. Investing time and money in an anime or manga production is risky and the safest bet is to pander to the most reliable audience (the manchildren.)

I could never find flawlessness interesting in this kind of art.

Dept of characters?