Albert Uderzo was one of the pillars of my comics childhood. I spent so many lunch hours reading “Asterix” (co-created with René Goscinny) in the school library. I’ve bought the books multiple times, because I read them until the pages fell out. I have all the hardcovers in the bookcase by my bed. I’d be a different person if these books didn’t exist. A lot of people would.
On the day that Albert Uderzo died, the art room at work stopped and for a while we all talked about our memories of reading the books as kids, then how we grew up with them and found new things as adult readers, and how his art influenced our own. (Apparently all of us were influenced by the way he drew hands—there’s so much character in them!)
Uderzo was a fantastic artist and storyteller. You can read “Asterix” at a breakneck pace, joke after joke hitting, and it’s a fantastic experience. All the core details you need are right there, easy to access, quick to absorb. But “Asterix” really rewards the slower read. There’s so much detail to explore, little stories going on in the background and visual puns and recurring gags, especially in the feasts and fight scenes. Oh, those magnificent fight scenes! It’s incredible to think Uderzo illustrated thirty-three “Asterix” albums, each with these sprawling fights, and yet he always found inventive ways to portray the action, a new take on the material—or something hilarious about repeating an old take. The fights were never tired or merely going through the motions.
There’s an irrepressible chaos in Uderzo’s work, full of boisterous and rebellious characters that refuse to behave. Even the most restrained character, the village druid (named Getafix in the international English editions, Panoramix in the American) has anarchy brewing beneath the surface. Oh sure, at first he seems a very ordered sort, but just watch the sort of mayhem he unleashes as soon as he’s captured by the Romans (or anyone else stupid enough to cross him). I can’t help but think of Uderzo as Getafix. He’s the maestro of chaos, but organized just enough so that it all works as a comic, never going completely off the rails, but feeling like it is in the best possible way. Uderzo was undoubtedly a druid himself.
But my favorite stuff was always the character-based humor—Dogmatix being upset about uprooted trees, Cacofonix the bard being gagged, Chief Vitalstatistix falling off his shield. The Romans were especially great, as they usually start off feeling confident at the beginning of the story, and break down bit by bit until the end. Uderzo could always capture that breaking point so perfectly.
And it’s this affinity for character-based humour that made me enjoy the travel scenes so much. So often they’re my favorite part of an “Asterix” album. Asterix and Obelix set out on a new adventure and, well, they have to spend a lot of time together. They play games as they travel, they tease each other, they argue, they refuse to talk to each other. They laugh and yell and cry, and it’s all fantastic. “Asterix” truly is a comic where the journey is more important than the destination, to the point that the destination is practically the same in each book: a village feast. The journey is everything.
I only knew Albert Uderzo through his art, but what an incredible journey it has been and still is. I continue to revisit “Asterix” to this day, and though there’s a certain sadness to it now, knowing Uderzo is gone, that’s soon eclipsed by laughing and unabashed joy.
Albert Uderzo: 1927–2020.
