Obscurity of the Day: Asterix and Obelix

The Asterix comic albums by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, published in France starting in 1959, are wildly popular in that country, and many other countries throughout the world. In the Canada of my childhood,Asterix was a familiar character to both French and English children, and many English kids learned French with the assistance of the wacky little Gaul and his oafish companion, Obelix.

However, Asterix has never really garnered wide interest in the U.S. That's a shame, because the characters are delightful, the stories are droll and full of terrific wordplay (most of which, miraculously, has been successfully translated to English), and the art is superb. My assumption is that Americans, who are, generally speaking, almost entirely innocent of knowledge of European history, just don't get the basic premise, and the various locales may as well be in Middle Earth for all they know. While that knowledge isn't absolutely necessary to understanding the Asterix tales, it certainly helps.

In 1977, Field Enterprises chose to take on the daunting, and ultimately thankless, task of adapting Asterix albums to American newspaper comic form. Adapting the albums to daily and Sunday strip form required a great deal of editing and reworking. The easiest way to see how much the material was changed is to compare with the (English translated) albums. Compare the strips above to the album pages below:

Not only does the art suffer terribly from the postage-stamp size reproduction of daily comic strips, but the storyline gets chopped up so much that the comedic pacing is completed defeated. It's a mess in other words, though I must admit that some editor really put a lot of effort into remolding the material, even sometimes creating new gags where they didn't exist. The Sundays weren't quite so badly chopped up, but of course the muddy newspaper coloring of the 1970s did those strips no favors.

EDIT 3/23/2021: Since this post was originally made, better information on stories has come to light. Here is the story list as compiled by Justin Bur:

Weeks	Start	End	Story
1 – 2	11/14/1977	11/27/1977	Introduction (Sunday starts 11/20)
3 – 15	11/28/1977	2/26/1978	Asterix the Gladiator
16 – 28	2/27/1978	5/28/1978	Asterix and Cleopatra
29 – 41	5/29/1978	8/27/1978	Asterix and the Great Crossing
42 – 54	8/28/1978	11/26/1978	Asterix and the Big Fight
55 – 67	11/27/1978	2/25/1979	Asterix in Spain (Sunday ends mid-story? Last known is 1/7/79)
68 – 69	2/26/1979	3/10/1979	Asterix in Britain (no Sundays, only gets part way through the story)

 Despite boastful claims that 150 clients signed up for the strip, you'll find it appearing in few papers, and by the end of the run the clientele was tiny. In fact, I've been searching for a definitive end date of the strip for years. However, now both Jeffrey Lindenblatt and Justin Bur have independently found papers that ran the strip to the same end date shown above (New Castle News and Windsor Star), so I think the case is closed. The only piece of the puzzle left unfound is the date of the final Sunday - no one has found it running anywhere near as long as the daily.

If Asterix intrigues you, I'm surprised to report than you can read all the albums, in English, at Asterix Online, for free.