27 Misc Laff: The Adventures of Asterix

As a quick follow-up to the post on silent slapstick and Lafferty, here is something on The Adventures of Asterix, which Lafferty reviewed in 1970. The comic was created in 1959 by the writer René Goscinny and the illustrator Albert Uderzo, and it's one of my favorites; you can see why it was catnip for Lafferty, with its historical satire and slapstick humor.

The series is set around 50 BC and rests on a simple premise: one scrappy village of Gauls won't accept Roman occupation and can outfox the legions thanks to a magic potion brewed by the local druid, Getafix (who is Panoramix in the French school edition that Lafferty read).

This potion gives temporary superhuman strength to the pint-sized Asterix. His lovably colossal best friend, Obelix, fell into a cauldron of it as a baby and so has permanent super strength. Together, the two of them travel across the ancient world. They get into trouble, and along the way they often outwit Julius Caesar's legions in stories full of etymological wordplay, anachronistic jokes, visual puns, and ethnic caricatures of European peoples and cultures. All of that is right up Lafferty's street.

Lafferty's references are American. "This is a comic book with class," he says, the kind of thing that might even set off a renaissance in American comics, which "are not dead; they're just dopey." He was a huge fan of old-fashioned cartooning. Forgotten bits of newspaper strips like The Gumps turn up in his work in odd places, and the funnies play a large role in the version of the twentieth century he tells in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny.

His characterization of the Asterix style says more about his own tastes than the style of an Asterix album. He says the style has some Johnny Hart's B.C., adds a little Snuffy Smith and a lot of Vaughn Bodē (who did the cover of Space Chantey), and then spends the most time on Al Capp, which he gets absolutely right. As a young man, Alberto Uderzo signed his cartoons "Al Uderzo" as a deliberate homage to Capp's influence. Lafferty points out that Obelix looks like Hairless Joe, the architect Numerobis (who is Edifis in the English translation) looks like Lonesome Polecat, and the potion magique is Kickapoo Joy Juice brewed with mistletoe in place of skunk cabbage. All are slam dunks.

He concedes that a summary catches none of it, any more than a summary of Mad would. "The flavor is lost in the description." His own verdict is that it is "slick stone-age stuff" fused with "tomorrow's French wit." That slick stone-age stuff may be the first glimmer of his idea for Austro's comic strip, Rocky McCrocky in The Men Who Knew Everything sequence.

One thing Lafferty notes in his review is the marginal gags in Asterix. His only warning about the book is that it "may cause eyestrain," since the reader keeps having to go back for something in the corner of a panel that was "too good to be comprehended at first glimpse." A good example comes early in the book he reviewed. Julius Caesar has just insulted Cleopatra by telling her that the Egyptians are no longer the great people they once were and are fit only to be enslaved. Cleopatra, justifiably pissed, breaks two vases, but the visual gag comes as Caesar takes his leave, stepping right across a relief of a woman's nose, as if he has kicked Cleopatra in the nose, a visual pun. In the next panel, if you look, you can see the nose on the relief between his leg and his cape.

What follows is Lafferty's review, printed in Science Fiction Review 35 (February 1970). He didn't write it for SFR; he wrote it for Kinesis, a zine with fewer than fifty readers, and his agent, Virginia Kidd, passed it along to Richard Geis with his permission so it would reach a larger audience.

Lafferty usually has an axe to grind, and there is that cranky note from the old man in Tulsa. This is one of the rare reviews in which he has nothing negative to say and is just happy to share something that makes him happy. The only real grievance is that nobody told him sooner, unless you count his frustration with contemporary American comics. There aren't many Lafferty pieces like it; his convention report "The Gathering of the Tribes" is another example of him just being happy.

Much later, when Dan Knight asked about the review, Lafferty mentioned that he still had three or four Asterix books in his comic collection and still really liked them, but that he had lost his carbon of the review. Then he waved it away as "not very important anyway."