This article appeared in the Excellent Norwegian magazine about
comics Tegn, issue 4/94. The author is Finn Bjørklid.
Translated, and slightly adapted for a international audience by me.
The article is good, but Bjørklid's language is at times unclear
and/or difficult to translate. But I should be blamed for all
errors. Oh, and I'm to blame for the illustrations too.
The precise quote from The World Encyclopedia of Comics was
kindly provided to me by Ashish Singhai. Senilix' view of foreigners
as put in English as well as his English name was provided by Jeroen
Pennings. Christian Menéndez Grotjahn sent me the picture captitions
translated directly from French. Supriya Sharma told me that
``scribe'' is the english word for the norwegian word ``skriver''.
Sanatan Rai found ``Corsica'' in his Webster when I didn't. Thank you
all. The quote from The Guardian is probably very inaccurate
since it has been translated from English to Norwegian and back. If
anyone has a accurate quote you could mail it to janl@ifi.uio.no, please?
The difference between the cultured person and the non-cultured person is that the cultured person only picks her nose when nobody can see. The cultured person don't read comics when others see either of course. The only exception is that one can dare being seen with is Asterix
With its rich gallery of characters, its excellent gags, and deliberate repetitions for comic effect, like the feast in the last window, and the repeated sinking of the pirates, the comic has won the hearts of it's readers worldwide.
The comic started a bit slowly at the end of the 50ies and start of the 60ies. When the first album appeared in 1961, after running as a series in the weekly magazine Pilote, only 6000 copies were printed. Already the year after La Serpe d'or (Asterix and the Golden Sickle) the number of copies had increased to 20000. The big breakthrough came in 1965 when the Gauls visited Egypt to help Cleopatra, with the cute nose (incidentally this is the first time Obelix got to taste the magic strength potion). After that the number of copies always were above one million. Asterix became the most sold comic in France ever. To put this in perspective Asterix sold around 22 million copies in the years from 1961 to 1974, about the same as the 22 Tintin albums put together between 1946 and 1972.
Asterix was translated to many languages, including the Nordic ones. The apperance of the last few albums have gotten broad coverage in the prime time news program on the Norwegian public TV station. In Germany, which was somewhat unkindly caricatured as a warlike Preusian country with a taste for torture and intrigue in Astérix et les Goths (1963), the series was published by the big publisher Kauka in the 60ies. Rather freshly they made main characters the western Germanic Siggi and Barrabas, and the mentioned Gothic album was published in a translation that made the story a kind of a anti-communist crusade against the east Germans, the DDR behind the Berlin Wall of that time. Goscinny got this rape against his work stopped after a few albums.
Perhaps this shows exactly how French Asterix really is, and that not everything in it will always be appreciated outside France. It seems as if Asterix is firstly a French comic, and secondly a European comic, at least it has never been accepted in the homeland of comics USA, where it's been introduced several times. Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Comics states that ``There are a few good things in Asterix (the clever use of balloons, drawing which is clean and uncluttered, and some genuinely funny situations) but the basic plot is tiresome and Goscinny's endless stream of bad puns and chauvinistic asides make this quite unpleasant as a strip.''
In spite of Uderzo's great drawings and it's undesputable commercial success it was criticized even in France. Under the easily accessible surface of Asterix some say they can see that Asterix, and thus Goscinny, and later also Uderzo, is a nationalist, racist and ``progressive party'' member (akin to the politics of France's own Le Pen), woman hater, and exponent of de Gaulle's imperialism.
It seems that Cæsar is the exponent of de Gaulle, and the biggest racist in the little village is Senilix (Translators note: His Norwegian name. English: Geriatrix). But he seems more like a classic EU resistor than a racist. He dislikes everyone not from his own village, and as he puts it: ``You know me, I've got nothing against foreigners. Some of my best friends are foreigners. But these particular foreigners aren't from this village!''. The most chauvinistic nationalism in Asterix is presented by Obelix, the figure with the lowest IQ, when he constantly proclaims that the Romans, Britts, Goths and Egyptians are quite mad; He is the only person that's not mad. Other nations have their own mix of egotism and home love, like when the Spaniards claim that Romans (when beaten up) taste best at home in Spain...
Asterix meets Cæsar. The text given here is from the
english edition of the album:
Cæsar: It seems to me that I know you, Gaul. Who are you?
Asterix: Obelix and Asterix!
Obelix First Legion, third Cohort and I don't recall the rest.
Male chauvinism is a difficult theme, not only vis-a-vis Asterix, but in most comics. In Tintin women are almost absent, and to the degree there are female characters they are portrayed as of-key singing/wailing battle axes (not unlike Trubarurix in Asterix, but he is, unlike Asterix, not teased about being single. There can be two causes for this, either because no woman can live with him because of his song, or because ``every one'' knows that his sexual preference does not allow marriage!).
In the first Asterix stories the women were totally absent, somewhat disproved by the story about Cleopatra, which is the exception that confirms the rule. Beginning after album 15, LaZizanie (1970), we see the begininnings of female characters, starting with the appearance of Mrs. Senilix, the village's sexy bomb shell. And in Le Cadeau de César (Cæsars gift, 1974) the women get to take part in the closing feast for the first time. The closer one gets to the present, with debate and laws for women's rights in Europe, the more distinct the women become. The stories, with out doubt, benefit from this, but when Uderzo, after Goscinny passed away, try to ironize over this evolution in society it goes all wrong. When Jon Gisle reviewed the 29th album (``Damenes inntogsmars'' in Norwegian) he concluded ``Yuck''. In Jon Gisle's words:
The story was simply that the bard Trubadurix, that was also the village teacher goes into exile. In his place a female is fetched, a feminist from Luteria (Paris). She stages a female rebellion in the village, and the men run off hiding in the woods. The chiefs wife Godemine (English: Impedimenta) takes over as head of the village.
At the same time the Romans have devised a new tactic. They have gathered a legion of women that are to attack the village. They know the Gauls, with their French gallantry, will never fight women.
The stage is set with women on both sides of the front line, and then they come, like pearls on a string, the clichés that makes this the worst album Uderzo has ever made. The Gaul women can't quite shake the old housewife role; they wonder how their men make it in the woods, and sends them warm clothes and good advice. What saves the situation in the village is a combination of male smarts and female vanity ??? I can't translate: forgjengelighet
Albert Uderzo defended himself in a interview in the English newspaper The Guardian saying: - It's possible I seem like a old reactionary, but I wished to embarrass Asterix using feminists. He's not used to women, especially not women with strong personalities.
It is possible that women had a more equal and prominent place in the old Gaul society, sitting in councils and even doing battle in wars. Asterix is, after all, not a purely historical satire, and it's not uncommon that women stay at home even today. It is our modern prejudices that Asterix parody, but mostly in a harmless way. Uderzo unfortunately shows his own prejudice in La rose et le glavie (A. and the Secret Weapon, 1991). Seldom has a female character like the Paris feminist Maestria been portrayed so hateful in the start and then taking a 180 degree turn and take part in the feast at the end (with the other village women incidentally). Maestria is said to be a caricature of France's tough prime minister Édith Creeson.
The traditional feast. The captition reads: And Obelix,
having found his Idefix, his good humour, his beloved whild boars and
his great appetite, a big feast reunites all our friends ... at least
nearly all...(the Bard sitting tied outside his tree house does not
count)
It seems strange that Asterix has become as popular as it is, and that it can be read outside France at all. It's so full or references to French history and modern French society. Almost all supporting characters in the comic are caricatures of actual French persons. But, even without speaking French, or without good knowledge of French society, you can decode symbols, and characters, both in the pictures and the text, and not all are specific to France.
In Astérix chez les Bretons most of the humor is based on making fun of the English. The English chief Zebigbos, doesn't he remind you of Winston Churchill? And when our friends, in Londinium, see the first pop band in history (compare Beatles), it's not only a apropos to the publishing year, 1966. In Asterix' odyssé (1981) Caesar sends out the best spy of times too look after our friends. What's more natural than portraying the spy as James Bond in the shape of Sean Connery? And when our friends visit Belgium, the homeland of the modern comic, what is more natural than paying homage to Belgium's big comic author and artist Hergé, by making Dupond and Dupont messengers of Caesar to the Gauls, complete with the characteristic bubbles. And the old man, Senilix', bomb shell wife, isn't she a slight parody of Brigitte Bardot?
That a person is someone else is a well known game in modern comics. Lucky Luke is crowded with such persons, and there is hardly a Italian comic where Corto Maltese can't be seen somewhere. The Roman tax man in Astérix et le Chaudron (1969) is a mercyles portrait of the right wing politician Giscard d'Estaing, and in Obélix et compagnie (1976) the enthusiastic Roman economist is no other than the gaulist leader Jacques Chirac.
More elevated are parodic allegories, and more people than economists, Marxists and political scientists can nod recognizingly to the story in Obelix et compagnie which is a very elegant summary of how the economy and the stock market run modern society. After menhirs became a more and more artificially inflated commodity Roman menhir merchants try to stop the import to Rome by closing the highways with menhirs. ``When did Romans start making menhirs?'' Caesar asks in despair. ``When Romans started buying them'' answers the Roman menhir merchant.
That this episode has it's real life counterpart in a dispute over French-Italian wine import is not a requisite to the story, but it makes it more plausible. Sometime in the 1970ies French wine makers stopped all drivers on a highway and forced them to drink French wine before driving on. Just to prove that French wine was much better than cheap imported Italian wine! Sometimes reality is as unreal as comics.
One could go on enumerating concrete codes, but Asterix is not only a sin of omission for the cultured human. One who has his head above water only sees the top of the iceberg. The depths and heights in Asterix, not mentioning the eminent art, makes the comic reach out to children and adults, schooled and and unschooled alike, and the difference in enjoyment is purely academic. The first thing hitting a reader is the artwork. It's unreal caricatures with big noses, but also a very skillful clean line.
The characters not only exist in a semi historical universe, but also in comic-frames over strewn with details, love, and warm colors (done by others than Uderzo, who is color blind). Every drawing a example of solid craftmanship and of a artist that's not in a hurry. Uderzo manages to load every frame to the maximum for comical effect.
If Uderzo's aim in the presentation of comical situations, sometimes satirical, sometimes parodic, is excellent, he is also a master of the large scale drawings of detailed city or village scenes. His minute drawings of architecture are impressive, they are not mere decorations, they make the comic better in a wide screen panorama kind of way.
Uderzo is the one to give our time some idea of life in antiquity, a cute idea perhaps, but still influential in our picture of early Paris and Rome, down to the typical bank, villa and house. But not all the panoramas are Uderzo's own, in the story where Asterix and Obelix goes to India on a flying carpet they take a detour over Acropolis. The drawing of Acropolis was copied from a general architecture book, but this does not make Uderzo any lesser, it only makes him human. At other times he leaves the cozy scenery of comedy in favor of a more serious tone, like his dark shading of interiors in ``Asterix in Corsica'', the Roman orgies, and poison murders in the Alp book. It is in the latter brilliant quote ``An orgy for one is pure nonsense'' appears (page 18).
Many have wondered what to make of the Romans, and incidentally Asterix. Is it only a violent comic, or is the violence only a parodic sport, a necessary rite to keep the story going? Are the Romans and Gauls only a allegory of the second world war, the Romans being Nazis and the Gauls the French resistance?
An other theory puts the Romans in the role of the central government in today's France, and the Gauls in the role of the outlying regions, more specificly the cultural resistance in Bretagne. That makes the Romans us, the technical, progressive modern society, and the little village, surrounded my enemies, is status quo, the dream about the past and the hope that things will stay as they are.
An important reason for Asterix' European success is their visits to their close EU neighbors. Asterix has taught Spaniards bull fighting, the Swiss mountain climbing, taken part in the Olympic Games in Greece, caused civil war in Germany, dropped by Rome a couple of times, followed the route of Tour de France (Translators note: Tour de France is a (in)famous bicycle race, sometimes called Tortour de France, because of the physical tests it presents to the bikers), and even discovered America before Leif Eriksson.
In the years after Goscinny's death Uderzo has managed to keep Asterix up, in spite of the popular misunderstanding, that Asterix was Goscinny's baby. Not all of Uderzo's books are good, but his best are on par with the best of the duo, like Asterix & Son (Le Fils d'Asterix, 1986) and Asterix' Odyssé (1981). In the later the artist honors his old comrade by giving his likeness to the friendly jew Saul, that appropriately is a scribe.
In latter years Uderzo has been bothered by a bad back and has enlisted his son to help with the drawings, but suspect catholic takeovers in the publisher side of things has sown doubts about how Asterix will go on. It has been said that the next album will be the last, but this seems uncertain. No matter what, the almost 30 books published so far is more than enough to secure Asterix a place in comic history. Well done!