> Every protagonist is a normal person, though sometimes extremely competent.

Or extremely incompetent! Gaston LaGaffe springs to mind, it's one of the most endearing and nice comics that I've had the pleasure to read.

And in a way Asterix is a superhero.

What strikes me about European comics from that era is that they are in general much more interesting culturally.

asterix heros are kind of brilliant like that. asterix is like superman but superman has superpowers that can be thwarted by kryptonite while asterix is simply the cleverest gauleois that makes the most out of getafix’s potion (wait, get a fix?? is that a pun I just discovered after 20 years?) On the other hand obelix is a big dummy that always has the potion superpowers (by virtue of falling in a coldron of it when he was young) and is terrible at using his superpowers without the help of the cunning asterix.

> wait, get a fix?? is that a pun I just discovered after 20 years?

You must be kidding ! Readymix just doesnt cut it. My favourites are dubbelosix, squareonthehypothenus and dogmatix.

Dogmatix is an especially brilliant one, since the original is Idéafix (stubborn, single-minded, literally "of fixed ideas"), and the translation not only manages to preserve that meaning but also add "Dog" to it :)

Exactly! The translators did such a fantastic job over all. I would have imagined that kind of humor to be untranslatable.

Same with the Muppets, whoever translated that show was doing an amazing job.

Yup, even as a kid I could tell the translators also had to be comedic geniuses too. I would constantly be marveling at the names, and how they were only a joke that made sense in English.

The original name would work in English too though. In the Danish translation the dog is is just idéfix which works just as well in Danish.

English does have the loanword https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9e_fixe#English but I think this is often considered technical vocabulary (per Wiktionary, in psychology and music composition) that most native speakers would probably not recognize.

I meant that idea and fixed are both English words, so it should be possible to associate ideafix with "fixed idea" - a bit more obscure though than the original.

Idéfix, not Idéafix! "Idea" is "idée" in French. It comes from "idée fixte" which means fixed idea, like you say, or in other words, an obsession.

Oops, you're right! I was mislead since in my native language, in which I read the books as a child, he is called Ideafix :)

Not to mention Lucretia, the young woman who married the wealthy old man (Lucre)

Good find ! had missed that one.

He even looks like Sean Connery!

There's much much more. Hope you enjoy some of these below.

https://www.everythingasterix.com/news-and-views-content/201...

https://www.everythingasterix.com/news-and-views-content/201...

You will find Paul McCartney too. When I read them as a kid in India I missed many of these, not the Beatles or Dubbelosix.

I have read every one of the 'originals' (Goscinny and Uderzo ones) so many times, but even now when I re-read them in my late 40s I discover something that I had missed before. Usually something happening in the background -- mark of stellar writing and drawing.

Dubbleosix is "zerozerosix" in the original. Maps one-to-one, I'd say.

I grew up on Asterix, but translated to Spanish. The names were all different, but usually good puns too. Admirable that they made that work in every language they translated them to!

The English translators did a great job. This page always stuck in my head for the wordplay: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/ZRlllWCKGjl9aKUy7F_WhgF4-B9fo74LY9...

Most of the joke is the same as the original, but the 'mild and bitter' part is an addition by the translators. Here's a blog post on them with a comparison of this and a few other pages https://auntymuriel.com/2012/12/23/asterix-in-translation-th...

I knew it would be this page before I clicked. Was not disappointed. This is the most amazing wordplay ever.

As a kid discovering the puns over time was a delight. I still remember revisiting an issue after I had fractured my arm, and doing a happy double-take coming across a couple called Ulna and Radius (these are the bones in the forearm [1])!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radius_(bone)

> wait, get a fix?? is that a pun I just discovered after 20 years?

If it's like in the French original (where Getafix is Assurancetourix, i.e. assurance tous-risques, full-coverage insurance), every single character name is a pun; so keep searching if you're missing some ;)

> where Getafix is Assurancetourix

Panoramix*

Geez, you're right :/

Welp, here is my excuse to binge the whole serie once again.

Assurancetourix is the bard.

Who in the English became Cacofonix

All the names are puns, even the translated ones. They're also super funny if you finally get it.

A podcast on this topic that I enjoyed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06txxmq

Warning : you may spend several hours here...

http://asterix.openscroll.org/

There are annotations which explain all the name puns, Latin translations etc.

Eg, in Asterix and the Big Fight, the character Cassius Ceramix - Ceramics: baked clay, earthenware. Cassius is a Roman name. Also a play on Cassius Clay, which was Mohammed Ali's given name

After growing up with Astérix and learning half my French from it (the other half from Tintin) there was a pun that I finally got only now, many years later, thanks to a French colleague.

In "Le Domaine des Dieux" (The Manions of the Gods) there is a character called "Oursenplus". This always registered to me as saying "And a bear" ("ours" is "bear" and "en plus" is like "one more" or "on top of that").

Then I asked my colleague: "I don't get this Oursenplus pun from Astérix, can you tell what it means?".

My colleague hadn't read the issue so he didn't immediately catch what I said, but he replied "Comment? Ours en peluche?"

Which, said quickly with a French accent sounds very much like "oursenplush" (with a "shh") and means ... "teddy bear" ("peluche" is "felt"; a plushy).

I have this kind of epiphany regularly with pop songs that I've known since childhood. I hear them again and my English is so much better now than it was back then that I realize I completely misunderstood the lyrics.

> getafix

Half the names are like this. My favourites are Dogmatix, Vitalstatistix and Impedimenta.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asterix_characters

Note that the names of many characters are changed from the original French, with different plays on words.

And sometimes the English ones are better! And I say it as a French who grew up on Asterix. In my opinion, the original names are good, but not great, and the translators did an outstanding job.

For example, the original French name for Dogmatix is Idéfix, which conveys the same idea, but without the "dog" pun.

Gaston LaGaffe is finally available in English as Gomer Goof for those who can't read French (or any of the many other languages, including minor ones like Norwegian, who got translations long before English)

The comics code authority neutered American comics for 4 decades. It's only when its grip started faltering that American comics got interesting again.

There are basically no European comics from the silver age period that wouldn't violate the CCA code in some way. American comics were samey precisely because the formulaic stories they told were basically the only ones that were allowed.

In the UK, Kaufje (TinTin), Asterix and Suske & Wiske (Janet & John) are well known

So is the little rabbit thing I forget the name of.

They are predominantly children’s books, of course.

Now… Rooi Oortjes isn’t known.

And The Smurfs.

Close, close... It's "Kuifje" and Rooie Oortjes" (Red Ears). I can't figure out the rabbit one you mention?

Miffy.

Konijntje in Dutch, if memory serves.

Nijntje

Damn. My memory fails me again!

I'm probably mistaken, but do you mean Marsupilami when you say "little rabbit thing"?

> not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes

I would argue that Rork - one of my favorite Franco-Belgian comic characters - counts as one. He would not feel very out of place at DC's Vertigo as Constantine's colleague of sorts.

And then there are Asterix and his friend Obelix, who having access to powers unavailable to regular humans, go around solving problems by punching people particularly hard - just like a regular Marvel/DC character would. ;)

Regarding 2., in the 1950-70s, these comics used to be published in weekly magazines first, and only published as albums a bit later.

> not a single comic (at least the ones written before the Marvel movies began dominating the culture) is about superheroes.

Um... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdupont

You've proved the parent's general point. From that page:

> It is a spoof of American super-hero comics that sends up French national attitudes.

I never understood US obsession with people fighting in ugly pajamas.

Because all of them are metaphors of social and personal struggles, and Europe has the 90% of them solved.

> and Europe has the 90% of them solved.

I highly doubt that.

Can you elaborate on the metaphors bit?

X-Men: black people and minorities struggling for civil rights.

Superman/Batman: Metaphor on politics. Control vs freedom.

Spiderman: Corageous journalism can end crime.

New Titans: Family issues thru generations, mostly.

You might wanna ask the north part of Marseille about that at the moment

Thorgal was pretty big here in Poland because up until 2018 the illustrator was Grzegorz Rosiński, who is Polish.

I remember Franco-Belgian comics being more popular around here - partly because those few American comics which you could see on store shelves usually contained a lot of gore, so they were appropriately labeled.

I have no source for this so anecdotal, but I read in some comic anthology that boycotting American superhero comics was an intentional act to preserve the local comics legacy. It didn't resist Manga equally well, though.

Nonsense, you could buy them but they were pretty boring and shallow compared to the French/Belgian/Dutch stuff.

Tintin and Asterix are pretty popular in the UK and India. Easily found in most bookshops. Beyond those, it’s much more scarce.

India has local language translations of Tintin and Asterix as well, example[1].

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tintin+bengali&t=fpas&iax=images&i...

Anecdotally the quality of the Asterix translations are pretty good, too, complete with the funny character names.

Definitely NOT scarce in Australia, though you won't find Tintin in Congo anywhere... in fact, even in the 1990s you couldn't find it.

Sorry, by “beyond those two” I meant “beyond Tintin and Asterix”, not “beyond the UK and India”. I’ve reworded my comment.

I spent my recess in the school library reading Tintin and Asterix!

I was born in northern France, spent my childhood reading "comics", visited the "comics museum" in Bruxelles multiple times and never heard of the Adventures of Jo and Zette before your comment. So I can understand why it's not well known in anglosaxon's countries.

I have found Blake & Mortimer [0] to also be a very interesting series. The graphical style is very similar to Tintin as the author (Edgar P Jacobs) worked together with Hergé in some capacity and later became a friend.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_and_Mortimer

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_P._Jacobs

Tintin is a superhero whose superpower is luck. It's hard to suspend disbelief when reading the stories without adding this pinch of salt, IMO.

Franco-belgian comics are popular everywhere except for the English-speaking world. It wasn't rare for a comic to be translated to a dozen languages, and English wasn't one of them.

The really big ones (Asterix, the Smurfs, Tintin) of course exist in English, but they're not all that popular, especially in the US. Niche US comic book publishers like Fantasy Flight periodically try to market some of the less-known but good looking F-B comics, but they rarely have the commercial success to have a whole series translated.

Franquin once made a joke about it, in one of the Marsupilami books there's a parodically evil American assassin who claims one if his victims was a Mr. Gagman who made the mistake of trying to introduce French comics to the US market.

I think that to many Americans, Franco-Belgian comics code as "children's comics" due to the drawing style. But most of them are directed at teens or older, just like US superhero comics.

Sadly, they're not popular in the U.S., but I love them. I switched my comics reading habit after nearly 30 years to European comics and haven't looked back. I prefer Asterix over Tintin, but I think reading Tintin with some of the historical background in mind might help. One of these days...

For anyone in North America looking for European comics to read, I review them at PipelineComics.com - there's something in European comics for everyone, from humor to action to drama and everything else.

Asterix is more aimed at children, compared to Tintin. Also, one of the best/funniest parts of Asterix is the constant wordplay, which often does not translate well (though the translators do try).

> the constant wordplay

That's why I consider them more adult comics. I discover something new every time I re-read them.

Yeah, but Hockridge and Bell did an amazing job with Asterix. It's still hilarious in English.