After keeping it French for the first two Asterix adventures, creators Goscinny and Uderzo took their heroes out of the country for the first of many times in this third installment of the series. This time the destination is Germany.
How did it work? Okay, I guess. You get another dose of the humor and visual splendor that still captivate young and old, including me. The story is a soft one, but it did set a successful template for the series it would return to again and again, of visiting a foreign land and having fun with its customs and culture.
We kick off with Getafix, the druid of Asterix’s village, heading off to a druidic convention. He is accompanied by Asterix and Obelix, who realize Getafix’s knowledge of their magic potion is not something they want to fall into enemy hands, even if their main enemies, the soldiers of the Roman Empire, are currently observing a truce. Despite all this, Getafix is kidnapped anyway, not by the Romans but a band of power-hungry Goths who plan to torture Getafix’s secrets from him.
As Daniel Craig once said: Good luck with that.
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| Confusion reigns in the early part of the book as Asterix and Obelix sort out what type of Goth they are facing. Germany in the 1960s was divided between East and West. Image from https://www.pipelinecomics.com/asterix-v3-asterix-goths/ |
The Asterix series was based on a simple premise, of underdog Gauls showing up their adversaries again and again with the help of their potion of indomitable strength. As a basic formula, this worked very well for the introduction of the series, Asterix The Gaul, less so with the follow-up, Asterix And The Golden Sickle. When your heroes are invincible, it kind of kills the suspense.
Asterix And The Goths doubles down on the invincibility angle, and in the process serves as a harsh reminder that, as much as I fancy myself a comics connoisseur, these books were originally written to please kids.
Taking the storyline from The Golden Sickle and giving it a twist, Goscinny and Uderzo simply replace the plight of Getafix’s cousin with Getafix himself and make Golden Sickle’s generic bandits into a nasty crew of Goths, led by Chief Choleric, who explains:
“Our mission is to capture the best Gaulish druid. We’ll take him back across the border, and then, with the help of his magic, we’ll plan the invasion of Gaul and Rome…”
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| Getafix heads into the druid conference, and into a trap. Accompanying him is a British friend and colleague, Valuaddetax. Image from https://guns2gewurztraminer.com/when-wine-becomes-a-magic-potion/untitled-2/ |
It is as if they already know about Getafix’s powers going in. Why not make that the plot and cut out the whole business with the druid competition, which goes on too long and doesn’t further the plot? I found my patience wearing thin as a lot of scenes in the book’s first half involve Asterix and Obelix beating up on sundry Roman legionnaires and Gothic warriors. I’m sure young boys loved this thing the way I did Sarge pummeling Beetle Bailey into goo, but as fan service it stoops a little too low for me today.
Probably much of this is my fault. Today we think of cartoons and comic books as being written to entertain adults as well as children, like “The Simpsons” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Back in 1963, however, when you were working for a top cartoon magazine like Pilote in France, the eyeballs you needed to keep your job were more exclusively juvenile. You didn’t want to write over their heads. Or if you did, make sure you connected it to a goofy visual.
Goscinny and Uderzo proved masters of working to multiple audiences, but they weren’t quite there yet. Goscinny’s jokes tend to overemphasize the stupidity of every non-Gaul, while Uderzo is not in top form, drawing some surprisingly bland backgrounds for scenes involving the Romans, for example, where tent canvas fills the backdrops for entire pages.
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| Asterix and Obelix disguise themselves alternately as Goths and Romans, which leads to Romans confusing each other for Gothic spies. Image from https://www.everythingasterix.com/news-and-views-content/2015/8/9/asterix-world-cup-goths-vs-class-act |
That’s a shame because the Romans provide the best part of the story, at least early on. General Cantankerus orders the Goth invaders captured and gets quite peeved by the idiocy of his troops. When two soldiers ask for seats to the circus after capturing some fellow Romans they mistook for Goths, Cantankerus promises them the best ones: “IN THE ARENA WITH THE LIONS!”
The second half of the book picks up as Asterix and Obelix infiltrate Germania to get their druid back. A criticism of Asterix And The Goths is that there is a distinct anti-German bias which overplays the stereotype of Teutonic brutes. I don’t see it that way. Yes, the Germans are heavies here, but like the Romans in this book they are being employed more as comic foils than targets of spite. Being both Jewish and French, and writing less than 20 years after World War II, one expects Goscinny to make more of the German thing than he does.
Instead, Goscinny’s humor about the Goths centers on confusion over whether the Goths are Ostrogoths or Visigoths, apparently referencing the then-modern-day division of East and West Germany. The German characters also speak throughout in heavy Germanic typography which makes them unintelligible to everyone else.
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| Okay, the goosestepping is a bit over the line. But most of the Teutonic jabs focus on Germans having short fuses and big moustaches. Image from http://majorspoilers.com/2013/11/28/retro-review-asterix-goths-1963/ |
Make no mistake, they are baddies, though amusingly so. Choleric threatens his own translator:
“If this druid refuses my demands, I shall be very angry, Rhetoric. I shall have the druid killed, and you along with him. Understand?”
Of course, this leadership approach proves counterproductive. By the end of the book, Rhetoric has morphed into a power-mad rival to Choleric, one of a half-dozen or so Gothic pretenders to chiefdom.
Getafix’s plan, once joined by Asterix and Obelix, is simple and effective. Give them all the potion they crave, then turn them loose on one another: “Being more or less equal, they’ll go on fighting each other for centuries…and they won’t stop to think about invading their neighbors.”
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| Asterix And The Goths may be one of the bashiest books in the series, with everyone dishing out concussion-grade punishment to each other. Image from https://www.asterix.com/en/portfolio/eccentric/ |
One imaginative page breaks down the whole mess into a series of goofy, groany puns that amuse in terms of sheer momentum:
Rhetoric goes after Lyric, with the avowed intention of “bashing him up” (archaic), but his rearguard is surprised by Metric’s vanguard. Bonk! This maneuver is known as the Metric System.
Whether Goscinny was making fun of Germany’s warlike nature or not, it does move the plot in a more creative direction, with Asterix and Obelix alternately pretending to be Roman and Goth as instruments of Getafix’s larger plan. The many other Asterix books Goscinny penned set in various European countries use the same kind of humor.
Maybe it’s the one-note nature of the humor that put me off. One Goth does get to express momentary enthusiasm for a druid’s flower trick (“I can like flowers even if I am a barbarian, can’t I?”), but they are pretty gothy Goths in the main, very moody and given to rash behavior.
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| Even a less inspired Uderzo book still offers cute and funny moments like this one, a stand-off between an owl and a woodpecker glimpsed while Getafix heads off to his druid conference. Image from https://www.pipelinecomics.com/asterix-v3-asterix-goths/ |
Uderzo does draw several clever panels bursting with creativity, sometimes employing overhead perspectives that pull you into the story, however lacking in tension the latter might be. The version I have is marred by atrocious coloring, though I understand later editions have rectified this.
In terms of world-building, there is precious little light shed here on Asterix’s fellow villagers, who show up only at the beginning and end. Dogmatix, faithful canine companion of Asterix and Obelix, has still not appeared three books in, despite a brief tease in the prior volume. Obelix does little but whine about not being able to drink any of the magic potion; his personality was still developing.
The
big knock I would make on Asterix And The Goths is also my most sincere
recommendation: It offers more of the same.
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