Every French person has heard these words at least once: “The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely… One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.”
Written at the beginning of every volume of the adventures of Asterix, these are some of the most well-known words in French comics — and French pop culture in general. They sum up an idea at the core of Asterix: the irrepressible resistance against oppression, something fundamental to a series that started publication barely 15 years after the end of World War II.
First published in 1959 in the French comics magazine, Pilote #1 , Asterix was created by writer René Goscinny and artist Albert Uderzo. Highly reliant on humor and wordplay, Asterix also lives and dies by Uderzo’s art style, which pushes the medium forward with its dynamism and expressiveness, taking the “big nose” style of the Marcinelle School and expanding upon it, strongly influencing the next generations of French and Belgian comic book artists.
So if you want to know more about the adventures of Asterix and Obelix, let’s talk about some Gaulish comics! [Read more…] about Asterix Reading Order!
). In Junior High, the first date I ever went on was spent gulping a clearly empty giant-sized coke to stem back the tears of Gandalf’s apparent demise. She would go back to school and tell the cool 7th graders that the time was spent in all sorts of hot make out sessions, but I will remember that mostly I was trying to make out those rascally little Hobbits through the tears. Nonetheless, my reputation grows. My first conspiracy theory.
#3 is decidedly void of bearded magic makers. The comic by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, and Steve Foxe continues one of the most captivating Image Comics premises in years with a dig inside the conspiracy universes of false flags and school shootings. In The Department of Truth, sufficient belief in a conspiracy can drive that fiction to manifest in reality, and the third issue focuses on a mother’s attempts to cope with the loss of her son in a school shooting. On the bottomless well of evil and inhuman agendas that insist her loss is a fiction. On the psychological and emotional trauma these conspiracies unleash. On the spiral of grief-stricken escape that could lead a woman to welcome this unreality over her own truth.