The puns are worse than usual, the story is a mess, and a lack of tension exposes the flabby narrative. But Albert Uderzo’s art keeps getting richer and more vibrant with every change in scenery, while René Goscinny’s joyful spirit goes a long way toward getting a reader to look past his slimmer-than-usual ideas.
Plus you get the arrival of a major character in Dogmatix, the compact but courageous canine who will keep Asterix and Obelix company from here on out. Dogmatix doesn’t actually do much in this book – but no one else does, either.
A new Roman “get-tough” policy sparks resentment from the village of doughty Gauls holding out against Caesar’s rule. Village hero Asterix and comrade Obelix decide the best way to show up their would-be oppressors is by embarking on a grand tour of the country, collecting different types of French food for a defiant banquet back at the village.
“Gaul is our country, O Roman, and we’ll go where we like in it!” Asterix declares.
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| The fierce reputation of Asterix and company puts a damper on Roman enthusiasm in this early scene from Asterix And The Banquet. Eventually the Romans will opt for a strategy of containment over conquest. Image from https://www.everythingasterix.com/latin-jokes-content/2015/2/21/asterix-and-the-banquet |
The pair opt for a roundabout route, one very familiar to generations to come as the circuit of the Tour de France bicycle race. Although traveling here is done on foot, on chariot, and on water, the end result involves a lot of riding, which I guess counts as parody.
Hard on their heels are an army of anxious Romans. “We’ll be the laughingstock of Gaul if they win that bet,” frets centurion Lotuseatus.
The comedy of Asterix And The Banquet centers around various Gaulish towns Asterix and Obelix visit, and certain commonly-understood characteristics of the people who live in those places today. Some are even recognizable to foreigners like me.
In Lutetia, the city that became Paris, streets are crammed with carts and horses. Nicae, on the Gaulish Riviera, is decorated by beautiful maidens in short togas. In Durocortorum, now known as Rheims, the makers of champagne offer to keep Asterix and Obelix’s presence a secret, or as one puts it, “Mumms the word.” They serve an amazing fish stew in Massilia, the future Marseilles, which seems a reference to bouillabaisse.
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| Augie De Blieck Jr. at Pipeline Comics has a wonderful online resource for all things Asterix, including this handy map showing the route Asterix and Obelix take in Asterix And The Banquet, and how it resembles the Tour de France. Check it all out! Image from https://www.pipelinecomics.com/asterix-v5-asterix-banquet/ |
Other gags are more obscure. In Camaracum, the future Cambrai, the items to collect are “humbugs,” which seems a reference here to the sardonic character of the townspeople. At Rotomagus, or Rouen, people tend to answer any question with a non-committal “could be,” which upsets the Romans in pursuit of Asterix greatly.
I guess Rouen folks had a reputation for being taciturn in 1965. Maybe they still do.
A key problem with Asterix And The Banquet may boil down to translation. Bad puns are part of the charm of these books, but you get some real groaners here, with much awkward phrasing. Translators Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge are usually so clever and sure-footed that I wonder if their work here was adulterated by other hands. Or else Goscinny was writing this one in an exclusively national vernacular, and making these gags work at all for non-French speakers required excessive verbal contortion:
“Rather a rough game of postman’s knock…but they’re walking into the Lyon’s mouth…”
“Riots! Revolution! We’re thinking of writing a song about that!”
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| Asterix and Obelix leave a legion of angry Romans in their wake at Lugdunum (today known as Lyons) in Asterix And The Banquet. The yellow color of their sack is perhaps a nod to the jacket leaders wear on the Tour de France today. |
Uderzo gets more mileage from the concept with his most consistently creative and diverting art so far. The succession of towns is rapid-fire, with a unique design idea for each, whether Asterix and Obelix are running through a maze-like succession of alleyways in Rotomagus or hijacking a luxury galley on the Seine.
He also incorporates Dogmatix’s debut in the form of a background gag, trotting after Asterix and Obelix across miles of land and water without any apparent encouragement from either until the last panel. It is easy not to notice the dog as Uderzo calls no attention to him and there is no mention of Dogmatix in the dialogue. He isn’t even given a name.
As I said in my review of Asterix And The Golden Sickle, I think Uderzo gave Dogmatix a preview cameo in that book, perhaps to plant the seed for his debut here. Dogmatix is not the most important character in the Asterix series – he’s no Snoopy or Snowy – but having him around gives the series some needed heart.
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| The many moods of Dogmatix. A star of his own line of children's books for years, he was given his own television series in 2021. Image from https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dogmatix-to-get-his-own-asterix-comic-book/ |
Asterix
And The Banquet
is sometimes chosen as the weakest entry in the classic early years of the series. I don’t
think it is all that weak – it is better than Asterix And The Goths, anyway.
What mostly hobbles it (beyond the France-specific humor, not an issue for its intended audience) is the lack of any
real challenge from the Romans.
Goscinny does try to spice things up with some Gallic intrigue. Two rogues, Unpatriotix and Uptotrix, attempt to betray Asterix and Obelix to the Romans at different points in the narrative, but these episodes are repetitive and anticlimactic.
More amusing is a later development where a pair of thieves make off with the bagful of regional delicacies Asterix has collected, a deft turn of events which gets an amusing payoff when the thieves are mistaken for Asterix and Obelix by the Romans and put on public display.
“But I tell you we’re Villanus…”
“…and Unscrupulus.”
Romans are often critical to the success of any Asterix story. If they aren’t given enough color or personality, their pratfalls get tedious.
Asterix And The Banquet kicks off with a good baddie, Inspector General Overanxius, who thinks he knows better than the commander on the ground about the wisdom of taking action against Asterix’s village. First he leads a frontal assault. When that ends badly, he has a fence built around the settlement to keep them bottled up, like Caesar did to the Gauls at the Siege of Alesia.
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| The Roman siege of the Gallic stronghold at Alesia in 52 BC involved surrounding it with a massive stockade, like so. If only the Gauls had some magic potion to make splinters of the fenceline, like Asterix does in Asterix And The Banquet. Image from https://bootcampmilitaryfitnessinstitute.com/2020/10/03/what-was-the-battle-of-alesia-52-bc/ |
Results will be different this time, Overanxius learns:
“Keep an eye on them!”
“An eye it’ll have to be…I can’t open the other one yet!”
As Asterix and Obelix travel through France, we mostly lose Overanxius as other, less distinctive Romans take over pursuit in their different regions. The village itself gets ignored entirely. Five adventures in, the home location hasn’t mattered in any of these stories since the first one, Asterix The Gaul, where it was sketched rather than developed.
Of course, having read these books before, I know what’s on the horizon: The Nile, and a run of terrific stories that built on the series’s comedy potential as much as the artwork. By itself, Asterix And The Banquet has more selective kid-based appeal than most of the Goscinny-written material. This is no bad thing, especially when you factor in Dogmatix. It just works much better when the material is a little sharper.
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