Asterix

• 1. Introduction

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  Asterix, the French comic album series, usually opens with a small joke at Rome's expense. The standard introduction reads: "The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely..." That hesitating last line has launched a series that has run for decades.

  By late October 2025 the series stood at 41 volumes and 393 million copies sold. That total makes it the best-selling European comic book series and the fourth best-selling comic book series in the world. Among comics sold as collected volumes, only One Piece has sold more.

  Four questions run through the story that follows. How did two men invent a tiny Gaulish village and its heroes? Why would a French comic choose a lost war as its stage? How do puns built from French survive in more than a hundred languages? And what happens to a hero when the people who drew him are gone?

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• 2. Two Creators, One Warrior

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  René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo already had a success behind them when Asterix began. Their earlier series, Oumpah-pah, had appeared in Tintin magazine. Asterix debuted in the very first issue of the Franco-Belgian magazine Pilote on the 29th of October 1959.

  Uderzo's first sketches showed Asterix as a huge, strong, traditional Gaulish warrior. Goscinny saw something different. He pictured a shrewd, compact fighter who relied on intelligence and wit more than raw strength. Uderzo then argued that a smaller hero needed a strong but dim companion, and Goscinny agreed. That is how Obelix was born.

  The magazine itself wobbled early on. Financial backing for Pilote ceased, and Georges Dargaud took the publication over. The first book, Asterix the Gaul, was assembled in 1961, and albums then arrived roughly once a year.

  Sales grew at a startling pace. The first album sold 6,000 copies in its year of publication, and the second sold 20,000 a year later. The third sold 40,000 in 1963, and the fourth sold 150,000 in 1964. The fifth reached 300,000, and Asterix and the Big Fight, in 1966, sold 400,000 on first release. In 1967 the ninth volume sold 1.2 million copies in just two days.

  Decades later, Céleste Surugue, the general director of Albert and René, explained the thinking behind the premise in a talk in April 2022. He said: "The idea was to find a subject with a strong connection with French culture and, while looking at the country's history, they ended up choosing its first defeat, namely the Gaul's Roman colonisation".

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• 3. Life in the Village

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  The village at the center of the series has no name, though rumour links it to Erquy in Armorica, a province of Gaul. Julius Caesar has taken nearly all of Gaul in the Gallic Wars. This corner survives because its druid, Getafix, brews a potion that gives temporary superhuman strength to whoever drinks it.

  Asterix is small, and he is usually trusted with the village's most important business because of his shrewdness. The chief is Vitalstatistix, whose name nods to his portly build. Beside Asterix stands Obelix, a corpulent, slower-thinking menhir deliveryman who fell into the druid's cauldron as a baby.

  That fall left Obelix with permanent strength, which creates a rule. Getafix steadfastly refuses to let him drink the potion, since the result would be dangerous and unpredictable. The answer arrives in Asterix and Obelix All at Sea, where the consequence turns out to be petrifaction into granite.

  After Asterix and the Banquet, Obelix adopts a little dog named Dogmatix, who tags along on most adventures. The books also follow a rhythm of travel. From volume 4 through volume 29, settings alternate, with even-numbered volumes set abroad and odd-numbered ones set in Gaul, mostly in the village.

  Later albums reach into science fiction and fantasy. Extraterrestrials appear in Asterix and the Falling Sky, and the city of Atlantis appears in All at Sea.

  Almost every album ends with a banquet under the stars, where roast boar is devoured and nearly everyone celebrates. The bard Cacofonix is the usual exception, bound and gagged so that he cannot sing. In Asterix and the Normans, though, it is the blacksmith Fulliautomatix who is tied up instead.

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• 4. Names That Are Puns

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  Gluteus Maximus, a muscle-bound athlete, wears a name that is literally the butt of the joke. In Asterix, every name is a pun on a role or personality, and each nationality follows its own pattern. Roman men end in -us, echoing the Latin masculine singular.

  The Gauls take the ending -ix for men and -a for women. The -ix alludes to the -rix suffix, close in meaning to rex in Latin, found in the names of real Gaulish chieftains such as Vercingetorix, Orgetorix and Dumnorix. The chief's wife, Impedimenta, is often at odds with him.

  Gothic names end in -ic, after chiefs such as Alaric and Theoderic, as in the interpreter Rhetoric. Greek names end in -os or -es, as with the restaurateur Thermos. British names end in -ax or -os and pun on taxation, giving the chieftain Mykingdomforanos, the druid Valuaddedtax and the mercenary Selectivemploymentax.

  Normans end in -af, as in Nescaf and Cenotaf, while Egyptians end in -is, as in the architects Edifis and Artifis and the scribe Exlibris. Some names come from outside the pattern. Dubbelosix is a sly reference to the codename 007 of James Bond, and Huevos y Bacon, a Spanish chieftain, is guidebook Spanish for eggs and bacon.

  Most of these jokes belong to one translation. The druid who is Getafix in English, a play on "get a fix", is Panoramix in French and Miraculix in German. Sometimes the wordplay is rebuilt rather than lost. Obelix's dog is Idéfix in French, from idée fixe, meaning an obsession, and Dogmatix in English, which keeps the sense of "dogmatic" and adds "Dog" at the front.

  The hero's own name comes from astérisque, the French word for the asterisk, which in turn comes from the Greek aster, meaning star. It is usually left alone in translation, apart from accents and local alphabets. Icelandic is an exception, with Ástríkur, glossed as "Rich of love", and so is Sinhala, with Soora Pappa, which can be read as "Hero". Turkish first called him Bücür, meaning "shorty", before standardising the name.

  Obelix may point to the obelisk, an Egyptian stone column that matches his size and his job carrying menhirs. It may equally point to the typographical obelus, a cousin of the asterisk.

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• 5. Abroad Through French Eyes

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  In Asterix and the Chariot Race, the Italians of the peninsula insist they are Umbrians, Etruscans or Venetians, and only the capital's people are Romans. Every album set abroad pokes at stereotypes of a country as the French see it, usually the modern-day version. Italy gets pasta, pizza and wine, along with jabs at Luciano Pavarotti, Silvio Berlusconi and political corruption.

  The Britons speak in early 20th-century aristocratic slang, much like Bertie Wooster. They stop for tea every day and make it with hot water and a drop of milk, until Asterix brings them real tea leaves. They also play darts, drink warm beer and eat boiled food with mint sauce.

  The Helvetians, who are the Swiss, love fondue, cleaning, accurate timekeeping and banks. The Goths, standing in for Germans, wear the Pickelhaube helmet of the German Empire and split into feuding factions. That detail refers to Germany before Otto von Bismarck and to the East and West German rivalry after World War II. The Iberians are proud and quick to anger, and thanks to Asterix they adopt bullfighting. The Greeks are often drawn in side profile, like figures on classical vase paintings.

  In Asterix and the Great Crossing, the Gauls reach North America. Obelix knocks out an attacking warrior, who hallucinates an emblematic eagle, then stars arranged as the Stars and Stripes, then stars shaped like the roundel of the United States Air Force. To flag down a Viking ship, Asterix holds up a torch, a nod to the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift from France.

  Even the speech bubbles change from one people to the next. Goths speak in Gothic script, and Cimbres use the letters Ø and Å. Egyptians speak in hieroglyphs with explanatory footnotes, and Iberians use inverted question and exclamation marks. Sarmatians, who represent present-day Ukraine, speak with some letters mirror-reversed, which evokes the modern Cyrillic alphabet.

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• 6. Jokes That Travel

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  Hiccups are written hips in French but hic in English, and that small difference let English-language legionaries decline their hiccups in Latin as hic, haec, hoc. Much of the multi-layered humour in the first Asterix books was specific to France. That specificity delayed translation into other languages, since publishers feared losing the jokes and the spirit of the stories.

  Some translators added local humour instead. In the Italian version, the Gauls speak standard Italian while the Roman legionaries speak in the Roman dialect. Obelix's famous Ils sont fous, ces Romains ! became Sono pazzi questi romani, which echoes the old humorous reading of the abbreviation SPQR. Newer albums lean on humour that is more universal, both in words and in pictures.

  The series has since been translated into 111 languages and dialects, according to the figures from April 2022, which makes it the most widely translated comic book series in the world. Regional translations are a tradition of their own. Volumes have appeared in Alsatian, Breton and Corsican in France, in Bavarian and Swabian in Germany, and in West Frisian, Limburgish and Tweants in the Netherlands. In Portugal, a special edition of the first volume was translated into Mirandese.

  Most volumes also exist in Latin and Ancient Greek, with teachers' guides, as a way of teaching those ancient languages.

  English took a while to settle. In the early 1960s, British comics such as Valiant, Ranger and Look & Learn ran translated strips under names including Little Fred and Big Ed, and Beric the Bold. In 1970, William Morrow and Company published three albums in hardback for the American market. Publisher Lawrence Hughes later recalled in a letter to The New York Times that sales were modest and that Bill Cosby tried to buy film and television rights before the series was dropped.

  Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge translated the first 33 albums into English and were widely praised for keeping the spirit and humour of the French. After Hockridge died in 2013, Bell translated books 34 to 36 alone and retired in 2016. She died in 2018, and Adriana Hunter took over.

  In December 2019, the US publisher Papercutz announced "all-new more American translations" by Joe Johnson, a professor of French and Spanish at Clayton State University. The launch was planned for the 19th of May 2020 and slipped to the 15th of July 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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• 7. Passing the Pen

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  Goscinny died in 1977, and readers implored Uderzo to carry on. He did, writing and drawing the albums himself but publishing them less often. Many critics and fans still prefer the albums from the Goscinny years.

  Uderzo founded his own publishing company, Éditions Albert René, for the albums he made alone. Dargaud, the original publisher, held on to the rights to the first 24 albums. In 1990 the Uderzo and Goscinny families sued Dargaud, and in 1998, after a long trial, Dargaud lost the right to publish and sell them. Uderzo sold those rights to Hachette.

  Rights to new albums were split between Albert Uderzo with 40 percent, Sylvie Uderzo with 20 percent and Anne Goscinny with 40 percent. In December 2008 Uderzo sold his stake to Hachette, which took over the company. In a letter in Le Monde in 2009, his daughter Sylvie attacked the sale. She wrote that her father "has betrayed the Gaulish warrior to the modern-day Romans".

  Anne Goscinny took the opposite view and sold her rights as well. She is reported to have said: "Asterix has already had two lives: one during my father's lifetime and one after it. Why not a third?"

  Uderzo then named three illustrators who had long been his assistants to carry on. In 2011 he announced a new album for 2013, with Jean-Yves Ferri writing and Frédéric Mébarki drawing. In 2012 the publisher said Mébarki had withdrawn because of the pressure of following in Uderzo's footsteps. Didier Conrad took over the drawing, and the 2013 date held. The result was Asterix and the Picts.

  In January 2015, after the murders of seven cartoonists at the satirical Paris weekly Charlie Hebdo, Uderzo came out of retirement to draw two Astérix pictures honouring the victims. He died in 2020.

  Fabcaro became the next writer, with Conrad still drawing. His first album, volume 41, Asterix in Lusitania, was released on the 23rd of October 2025. The title people, the Lusitanians, are the series' Portuguese, whom Uderzo described as polite after every Portuguese person he had met.

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• 8. Beyond the Page

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  Parc Astérix opened in 1989-35 kilometres, or 22 miles, north of Paris. It draws around 2.3 million visitors a year and counts among the most visited sites in France. The Studios Idéfix were founded in 1974, and Studio 58 opened in 2016. Both aimed to make the franchise a "100% Gaulish production" that keeps creative control and French jobs in house.

  The screen history starts in 1967 with Deux Romains en Gaule, a black and white television film that mixed live action with animated heroes. Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar, in 1999, and Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, in 2002, were major box office successes in France. Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom, in 2023, sent the pair to China to rescue an empress from Julius Caesar. In 2025, Netflix released a computer-animated miniseries of The Big Fight, directed by Alain Chabat. Surugue noted that the animated movies had recorded over 53 million viewers worldwide, and that a new album appears every two years, with print runs of 5 million and an estimated readership of 20 million.

  The name has traveled well beyond comic shops. France launched its first satellite, Astérix-1, in 1965. Asteroids 29401 Asterix and 29402 Obelix carry the characters' names. In 1986 Asterix appeared on posters over the Eiffel Tower during Paris's failed bid for the 1992 Summer Olympics.

  The pair appeared on a cover of Time in 1991 for a special edition about France. In 2009, the magazine described Asterix as a symbol for some of France's independence and defiance of globalisation. Even so, he has promoted McDonald's, in an advertisement showing the villagers holding their traditional feast in one of its restaurants.

  On the 29th of October 2009, Google marked the 50th anniversary with a Doodle in many countries. France issued a commemorative €2 coin for the 60th anniversary in 2019. Asterix and Obelix were the official mascots of the 2017 IIHF World Championships, hosted jointly by France and Germany. In Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, the boss Burt the Bashful looks slightly like Obelix, so the French and German versions renamed him Gros Bélixo and Xilebo.

  Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe, volume 2, puts the trio into the Gallic invasion of Italy of 390-387 BCE. In the final panel they trudge off into the sunset, and Obelix says: "Come on, Asterix! Let's get our own comic book."

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