“Yes, Uderzo was trying to do something different, and it didn’t quite work,” Grove agrees. Uderzo illustrated his solo books in a glitzier manner, constructed them around thematic storylines, and sometimes clumsily tempted to force them to make larger, more overarching connections to society. Somehow, they felt different from classic adventures like “Asterix and the Laurel Wreath,” “Asterix and the Roman Agent,” “Asterix in Switzerland,” and all the other volumes I grew up reading in Geneva, Switzerland.
These included “Asterix and the Actress,” “Asterix and Son,” and “Asterix and the Secret Weapon.” But I’ll confess here-and I’ve read every single publication several times-that I didn’t really enjoy the Uderzo works. That’s telling, since this is the first new Asterix adventure in a while, and a brand new writer-illustrator team has done it.įollowing the death of the original wordsmith Goscinny in 1977, illustrator Uderzo put out a few solo volumes. “It was sold out in Glasgow city bookstores,” he says. Laurence Grove, Reader in French at the University of Glasgow and president of the International Bande Dessinée Society (an organization dedicated to the scholarly side of French comic books), believes the newest comic has everything it takes to satisfy hardcore Asterix fans. (The famously fierce Picts, a Celtic tribe, lived in today’s Scotland.) Now fans excitedly wait for the release of Asterix and the Picts, the latest work inspired by Goscinny and Uderzo. The adventures of these off-beat characters have brought fun since the early 1960s to readers in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Many people on our side of the Atlantic don’t know Asterix or his paunchy BFF Obelix, who fell into a cauldron of the magic potion when he was a baby, or Obelix’s microscopic pooch, Dogmatix.
Never read an Asterix comic book? Never even heard of Asterix? With easy access to that wonderful magic potion, Asterix is the de factor champion defender of his turf and gets one up over the Romans at every turn. Meet the brainchild of French comic book duo René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo and meet their hero, Asterix, a tiny man with a big nose. It remained fiercely independent of the empire, its citizens fortified by a secret magic potion that imbued them with a superhuman strength envied and feared by the highest echelons of Roman administration-and even by the great Julius Caesar himself. At apogee, it extended all the way across Europe and the Mediterranean basin, into Africa and Asia.īut one little unnamed village in the middle of the land called Gaul (now France) never succumbed to Roman might, though surrounded by Roman territory and under constant siege.
It wasn’t easy to stay clear of the Roman Empire.
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