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Asterix: The Fiftieth Anniversary Launch

Published Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:00:13 -0500

Pedro Bouça reviews the new Asterix book, as well as the 50th anniversary launch in Lisbon.

The world premiere of the new Asterix book happened on the night of October 21th to 22th.

The event was celebrated on the eighteen countries where the book was simultaneously published, with the impressive print run of 3.5 million copies. 60 thousand of them just for Portugal, very high numbers for the country. Longtime fan of the series, I decided to brave the heavy rain that fell on Lisbon that night to participate in the launch of the album. What I do for Asterix!

Arriving at the event site, I was noticed immediately the thematic decoration, including the presence Asterix and Obelix themselves (costumed actors, of course). No fewer than two TV stations were covering the event, state network RTP and the private TVI! Interestingly, just a few hours before it had happened on the same site a less mediatic event… The Windows 7 release! Better luck next time, Bill Gates …

Note the Portugal was the very first place where Asterix (and Tintin before it!) was translated from the original French. Yeah, suck it Flanders! So the series has a long tradition here, hence the media interest.

So let's get to what really matters, the album itself!

As promised, it's a short story and illustration collection, effectively using all the archive material from the series still remaining. There's even a text by original writer René Goscinny about vacations in Gaul (with spot illustrations by Albert Uderzo, still an excellent artist by any standards), still funny over 40 years after being written originally. Sadly that's the sole Goscinny content on the book.

The book itself opens with a sequence showing Asterix and Obelix fifty years older, a reference to the characters 50th anniversary. It's funnier than it sounds and includes an amusing appearance by the author Uderzo, which seems to be like his farewell to the characters.

This is equally apparent on the book forewords by "Asterix" (surely Uderzo himself, a bit too self-congratulatory for my taste) and Goscinny's daughter Anne, which gives out more sincere praise to Uderzo. The tone continues on the framing sequences between the stories. Framing sequences which are also the book's main drawback.

You see, instead of separating the stories, like in Asterix and the Class Act (the series previous short story collection), Uderzo decided to connect the stories (and even much of the illustrations, which represent about half the content of the book) with an extremely tenuous narrative thread. This does not do the material any favours and makes the whole of the book less than the sum of its parts. This is a shame, because some of those parts are quite good.

It is worth mentioning, for example, a short story that shows Obelix trying to learn to read (previously published in the French literary magazine Lire), the "bloopers" from the Asterix and the Actress book (way better than the book itself…) and even a series of Asterix paintings parodying classic masterpieces.

Interestingly the album closes with a short story that includes the only scatological joke ever to be featured on the series. I think Asterix could have done without this kind of humour, but if it is indeed true that Christophe Arleston will actually be chosen as Uderzo's replacement as Asterix writer, then I guess readers will have to get used to it.

In the end, Uderzo thanks his assistants Régis Grébent and Thierry and Frédéric Mebarki (the same he named as his successors as the series artists in a recent interview), a rare and laudable initiative!

Anyway, as I said the whole book is less than the sum of its parts. I do think it is worth buying, and it's certainly a better book than its widely criticized predecessor, but in the end it was hurt by Uderzo's attempt to "tie" everything together. Which makes it a fitting end to Uderzo's "solo" run on the series, I guess.

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