The 50th anniversary of the small but cunning
warrior Asterix and his pudgy
stonemason pal Obelix is being celebrated with a new book of their adventures, The Birthday of Asterix and Obelix, the
34th in a series, time.com says, that was initially “created as a way to keep
American comic strips from taking over France.” (Not a bad idea, now that it
has surfaced again. How else could France be taken over but by
comics?) The new book celebrates the golden jubilee with 56 pages of
unpublished drawings by the characters’ co-creator, comic artist Albert Uderzo, who said: "It's a
little different from the classic albums," adding, “they’re short stories,
in which all the characters refer to the anniversary." The new book, said
the Barcelona Reporter, contains many
of the friends that Asterix has accumulated over fifty years because everyone
is invited to the big party that the villagers have prepared. “The artist
recalled the birth of these adventures, when on October 29, 1959, these Gauls
appeared in the first issue of the weekly magazine Pilote, a magazine that aimed to address the invasion of U.S.
comics.” Asterix the Gaul came out in
book form in 1961, bearing the name of Uderzo and his co-creator, Rene Goscinny, and since then millions
of readers have benefitted from the 32 books that followed, plus eight animated
films.
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