Obituary: Albert Uderzo

Albert Uderzo

1927 – 2020

Illustrator of the Asterix comic-strip albums for forty years, Alberto Uderzo, who died on March 24, was the ideal counterpart for the writer René Goscinny and his inspired gift for verbal comedy. Already working together on different comics, in 1959 they set a story in a remote Brittany village which Goscinny suggested should be on the coast in case there was a need for characters to take any future sea journeys. A slogan at the start of each adventure announced that this was the only part of ancient Gaul undefeated by Julius Caesar.

The hero of this pleasing if imaginary resistance was Asterix, a cunning, quick-tempered, extravagantly whiskered local chieftain. Habitually wearing a winged helmet, he was capable of hunting and killing a wild boar without using any weapons. Heavily muscled, if in need of extra strength he could revive himself by drinking a local druid’s magic potion. This idea may have come from American Popeye comics read by Uderzo as a child. But in every other way he was a true original, inventing a host of grotesquely comic characters acting out against often meticulously detailed backgrounds.

Wilfully anachronistic, the album like its many successors was an immediate hit in France and everywhere else, translated into over a hundred languages and selling up to 375 million copies. Over here they benefited enormously from Anthea Bell’s inspired translations. Goscinny originally suggested that Asterix should be a cunning warrior no bigger than a child. Uderzo, who had originally thought in terms of a more heroic build, went along with this but insisted he should also have a long nose simply because he liked drawing long noses. Super human strength was left for Asterix’s amiable but dim giant companion Obelix. Other regular companions included chief Vitalstatistix, druid Getafix and tone-deaf bard Cacofonix.

Many battles and dangerous deeds followed, with this mixture of adventure and comic relief just what readers young and old were looking for. Soldiers in the Roman legions were portrayed as ridiculous rather than evil, and death had no place in their invariable defeats. Occasionally leaving Gaul the couple made one memorable trip to Britain, where they unwittingly introduce the daily tea-drinking habit. Uderzo’s vision of manicured lawns in a succession of leafy suburbs where everything stops promptly at 5pm and at weekends was up to his usual high standards of comic humour.

Elsewhere, his painstaking reconstructions of Roman settlements, palaces and temples were always as accurate as possible. There were also visual jokes: a cartoon version of Géricault’s The Wreck of the Medusa showing a group of pirates stranded on a raft, or a slave adopting the pose of Rodin’s Thinker. Every now and again Uderzo and Goscinny themselves would feature, usually as anonymous Roman soldiers. There was also an appearance of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, offering subsidies for the ancient stone menhirs that were such a feature in these albums. Laurel and Hardy and the Beatles also had a look in.

When Goscinny, now an intimate friend, died in 1977 Uderzo reluctantly continued with nine more Asterix albums on his own. While still good they could not rival earlier editions, and in 2009 he retired, selling the rights to Hachette. Already filmed fourteen times and turned into at least forty video games, the stories now form the centrepiece for Parc Asterix, a theme park near Paris. The first French satellite launched into space in 1965 was named after this indomitable hero. There were also over a hundred licensed products.

Uderzo’s carpenter father and his wife, both Italians, had already moved to France before Alberto, a fourth child of six, was born in 1927. Growing up in a suburb of Paris and drawing from an early age, he initially wanted to be an aircraft mechanic. He spent some of World War Two working on a farm in Brittany, an area he used to refer to as a ‘magical region’ and which he later celebrated so affectionately in his art. Colour-blind, he had to rely on stickers to identify different shades. In 1953 he married Ada Milani. They had one daughter Sylvie, who later worked with her father, not always harmoniously when it came to the future direction of the publishing company they jointly owned.

Throughout his life he loved cars, using some of his considerable wealth to buy a Ferrari. Retiring in 2013, he submitted two more illustrations to Le Figaro in 2015 in response to the Charlie Hebdo killings. One showed Asterix punching a terrorist out of his sandals; the other, more sombre, pictured Asterix and Obelix together again, both with heads bowed. Naturalised in 1934 and by now much decorated by the grateful country he had entertained so well, he died aged 92 of a heart attack.

Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.