Joe Camel, the cartoon character that became the focus of perhaps the most intense attacks ever leveled against an American advertising campaign, is being sent packing by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which will replace it with stylized versions of Camel cigarettes' original camel trademark.

The unexpected decision, announced yesterday, ends a nine-year run in this country for Joe Camel. The embattled ad figure and his brethren, bearing names like Buster, Max and Floyd, will disappear from billboards, print advertisements, display signs and even store-door stickers. Joe Camel's goofy grin, oversized nose and exaggerated depictions of masculine behavior had helped Reynolds stem a decades-long sales slide for Camel by imbuing the brand with a hipper image.

But the gains in sales and market share for Camel, the nation's No. 7 cigarette brand, came only at a high cost as anti-smoking activists convinced President Clinton, the American Medical Association, several Surgeons General, the Federal Trade Commission and other authorities that Joe Camel was emblematic of what they maintained were the insidious, underhanded marketing gimmicks by which cigarettes are sold in America. Particularly, the activists hit home with contentions that slick, colorful presentations of a grinning cartoon animal were intended to appeal specifically to children to take up smoking.

''Joe Camel represented an icon that refueled the moral outrage of the anti-smoking movement,'' said Eric Solberg, executive director of Doctors Ought to Care, an anti-tobacco group in Houston. Reynolds has always denied that Joe Camel -- introduced to Americans in 1988 after more than a decade of selling cigarettes to Europeans -- was anything but a standard marketing tactic meant to persuade adult smokers to switch to Camel from bigger brands like Marlboro.