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I grew up in Canada, and so was exposed to Asterix. As were people that I've met from France (of course), Australia, India, Spain, Germany, etc, etc, etc.

And yet in the United States the comics are almost non-existent. My best guess is that American publishers don't think that Americans will understand such sophisticated humor.

Whatever they think, kids that I expose to the comics consistently love them. At a younger age for the physical humor (such as Obelix accidentally walking through doors). At an older age, for all of the layers (many of which I know escape me).

The originals were excellent. The translations are excellent. I highly recommend them. Though I'd recommend starting with the ones written while Goscinny was still alive. The look of the latter ones is still the same, but there is more reference to repeated in jokes and the overall humor is not to the same quality.

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I'd recommend starting and stopping with the ones written while Goscinny was still alive. I've read a few of the post-Goscinny books, and I found their emptiness creepy, and almost never funny. Though for the most recent books, the former author tried various successors, so there might be some success among those.

I'd even argue that Asterix was great in the 50s and 60s, but the authors (Goscinny and Uderzo) were less inspired in the 70s. Their best period was from "Astérix et les Goths" (the third one) to "Astérix et les Normands" (ninth one, my personal favorite). Goscinny suddenly died in 1977, but the Asterix series had become such an institution that millions of copies of each book were sold, whatever the quality.

(edit: typos)

That's a matter of taste.

I agree that the quality dropped, but it is up to the reader to decide whether a chance to revisit old friends is worth the fact that they aren't up to snuff. For me it was marginally worthwhile a couple of times. For others it is not. But I won't tell others not to do what I did.

Black Gold comes to mind as the best of the later books. Asterix and the Class Act I've meant to read for a while as the stories were written by Goscinny.

Of course the English translations rely a lot on Bell and Hockridge. They are absolutely masters of the pun.

The quality definitely took a dip after Goscinny wasn't writing anymore. It went from "constantly great" to "hit and miss". Kind of like the Simpsons post season 8-ish.

It was even worse for Lucky Luke after Goscinny.

Iznogood on the other hand, while it did change in character, it went even crazier and funnier when it went 100% Tabary.

America suffers from cultural not-invented-here syndrome. Eurocomics are generally thin on the ground here, and there are some great ones we're missing out on.

That, and they may contain material prudish Americans may find objectionable. The threat of having your sales scuppered or even being brought to court by religious groups on the right, feminist groups on the left, or helicopter parents' associations on either side, is very real. The Anselme Lanturlu comics (Archibald Higgins, in English) were released in many countries, but censored in only two: the United States and Iran. Anselme's girlfriend Sophie, a voluptuous blonde whose generous cleavage is almost always on display, is a bit more covered up to hide the cleavage in the U.S. release. In the Iranian publication, she is covered from head to toe and wears a hijab.

There was a magazine in France in the 70s (or even before) called Pif. I recently learned that it had highly politicized roots, partly funded by French communist party, and trying to fight American cultural imperialism (Disney invasion) through this publication.

As a kid I never suspected any of this.

I read both Asterix and Tintin growing up in the US, and love them, but I've never laid any claims to being normal.

Getafix the Druid will be high on the minds of Canadians nowadays!

I'm not Canadian, so I'm left wondering. What do you mean?

I guess Canada recently legalised cannabis. People could turn Getafix into a drug reference.

> My best guess is that American publishers don't think that Americans will understand such sophisticated humor.

I must admit I too feel as tempted as always to go "dense Americans and their superhero comics", but here the reason is probably simply that a big part of the humour is done by poking fun of European national stereotypes, and also regional stereotypes of France. None of that translates really well to an American audience.

You don't need to be familiar with the actual stereotypes to get jokes about them. As a kid in New Zealand I understood "Hey these people are all the same in this funny way, and the puns about it are great!".

Asterix is incredibly dense with jokes; you can miss lots and still find it hilarious.

Very popular pretty much all around the world... except the us.

when i was a kid many school libraries (do schools still have libraries?) had all the tintin and asterix books but no other comics.

As an American kid, Asterix was kind of amazing. At least to me. It was a comedic glimpse of a much wider world than US-centric stuff, plus a bunch of jokes about European history.

I probably missed a lot of the jokes. That’s fine. I got a bunch of them, and I laughed at the goofy drawings.

>I must admit I too feel as tempted as always to go "dense Americans and their superhero comics", but here the reason is probably simply that a big part of the humour is done by poking fun of European national stereotypes, and also regional stereotypes of France. None of that translates really well to an American audience.

It's read all over Europe (and other places, including Canada and Latin America), in countries who are not familiar with the "regional stereotypes of France" (nor do they have to be to appreciate it).

As for the references to "European national stereotypes", I don't see why they should pose a pose to Americans (if them being dense wasn't the problem). They are quite basic (doesn't require any intimate familiarity with the countries besides a basic knowledge), so if they weren't mostly ignorant when it comes to foreign cultures, they would have recognized those too.

Yet it translated well to a Canadian audience (Canadians really aren't THAT different from Americans), and was understood by every American child that I tried showing it to.

Yes, there are jokes that get missed. But so many are understood that it was still funny.

Wouldn't Canada be more receptive to Franco-Belgian comics due to the large number of French speakers?

America had its own influential comic book industry since the early twentieth century, so it never got into importing them. For most of Europe (and beyond) the comics made in France and Belgium and translated in the vernacular were the absolute cornerstone of comics for most of the previous century.

A lot of European kids who grew up in the twentieth century know about the American Old West through reading a cowboy comic (Lucky Luke) made by a Belgian, and first heard of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire through Asterix.

I don't know, they were massively popular in India too, with local translations of most of the names. I still remember Getafix as Etashetamix (lit. "mix of this and that") first and foremost.

I grew up in Victoria, BC. There were a lot of Asterix fans, and relatively few French speakers.

I have vague memories of watching Asterix on TV as a child in the US. I think it was around for a while, but fell off the map in the 80's at some point. So there's a bit of a generational element at play.

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