ASTÉRIX THE GAUL, STUBBORNNESS & SENSE OF HUMOR

Today, The Grandma has been reading some comics of Astérix le Gaulois, the comic that was first published in 1959.

Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix, in French Astérix or Astérix le Gaulois (Asterix the Gaul) is a bande dessinée comic book series about a village of indomitable Gaulish warriors who adventure around the world and fight the Roman Republic, with the aid of a magic potion, during the era of Julius Caesar, in an ahistorical telling of the time after the Gallic Wars.

The series first appeared in the Franco-Belgian comic magazine Pilote on 29 October 1959.

It was written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo until Goscinny's death in 1977.

Uderzo then took over the writing until 2009, when he sold the rights to publishing company Hachette; he died in 2020.

In 2013, a new team consisting of Jean-Yves Ferri (script) and Didier Conrad (artwork) took over.

As of 2021, 39 volumes have been released, with the most recent released in October 2021.

The series follows the adventures of a village of Gauls as they resist Roman occupation in 50 BC. They do so using a magic potion, brewed by their druid Getafix (Panoramix in the French version), which temporarily gives the recipient superhuman strength.

The protagonists, the title character Asterix and his friend Obelix, have various adventures. The -ix ending of both names (as well as all the other pseudo-Gaulish -ix names in the series) alludes to the -rix suffix (meaning king, like -rex in Latin) present in the names of many real Gaulish chieftains such as Vercingetorix, Orgetorix, and Dumnorix.

In some of the stories, they travel to foreign countries, while other tales are set in and around their village. For much of the history of the series, settings in Gaul and abroad alternated, with even-numbered volumes set abroad and odd-numbered volumes set in Gaul, mostly in the village.

The Asterix series is one of the most popular Franco-Belgian comics in the world, with the series being translated into 111 languages as of 2009.

The humour encountered in the Asterix comics often centers around puns, caricatures, and tongue-in-cheek stereotypes of contemporary European nations and French regions.

Much of the humour in the initial Asterix books was French-specific, which delayed the translation of the books into other languages for fear of losing the jokes and the spirit of the story.

The various volumes have been translated into more than 100 languages and dialects. Besides the original French language, most albums are available in Bengali, Estonian, English, Czech, Dutch, German, Galician, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Slovene, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Latvian, Welsh, as well as Latin.

Selected albums have also been translated into languages such as Esperanto, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Scots, Indonesian, Persian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Bengali, Afrikaans, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Frisian, Romansch, Vietnamese, Sinhala, Ancient Greek, and Luxembourgish.

More information: Astérix-Le site officiel

You may call it rain in the south,
but over here it's just a bracing dampness in the air.

Astérix