comics – Page 4 – Aunty Muriel's Blog

Posted on October 15, 2013January 8, 2016 by Aunty Muriel · 1 Comment

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books: #2 (joint position) The Asterix Books by Goscinny and Uderzo

I started reading Asterix during my middle school years, and I well remember the scuffling and elbowing which regularly took place in the school library as everyone fought to grab at the titles on the Asterix shelf. My Aunty Clo and Uncle Jim bought me Asterix the Gaul, my first Asterix book, for Christmas in 1980 when I was nine years old, and I have read and re-read these books ever since. I saved my pocket money to buy them from WHSmith when I had to give up on the library because everyone else’s elbows always seemed to be far sharper and harder than mine and I could never get to the Asterix books without suffering various blows to my weedy little person. In those days – and this may still be the case – Asterix books came in two sizes, and you could buy a copy of the book in a size slightly smaller than A5 which cost 75p. These days, I have in my possession every Asterix book in both English and French. The books are scruffy, foxed and yellowed, but all that’s just proof of how long I’ve had them, how often I’ve read them and how much I love them.

I say ‘every Asterix book’, but that’s not entirely true. Goscinny was the partner who wrote the scripts and the quality of the storywriting rapidly faded after his untimely death: Asterix in Belgium was the last book Goscinny and Uderzo produced together. Uderzo still struggles gamely on alone, but the Asterix books have come to be aimed at a much younger market and all the joy of the original has vanished. The drawings are as beautiful as ever, but the sophisticated wordplay is long gone. There’s a new book due out very soon, if it’s not out already, and I’m not going to read it. I just can’t bear to see what has become of Asterix. I stuck with it for as long as I could, and I’ve enjoyed some recent compilations: Asterix and the Class Act, for example, which appeared in 2003, brought together some previously unpublished short stories, and 2007 saw the publication of Astérix et ses Amis, in which a number of artists paid tribute to this character with their own very amusing versions of the plucky little Gaul and his companion envelopé. But to be honest, everything from Asterix and Obelix All At Sea onwards just hasn’t been up to scratch.

I’ll return now, though, to the good stuff, because I have, after all, placed Asterix in joint second place as one of My Top Five Favourite Comic Books. I’ve chosen one Asterix book dating from the years of the Goscinny/Uderzo partnership to represent the entire oeuvre, rather than trying to write about the whole lot in one blog post. The book I’ve chosen is Asterix and the Roman Agent, or La Zizanie in French; semer la zizanie is to sow discord, or to stir up ill-feeling, and a ‘zizanie’ is ‘a type of invasive weed’. The name of the Roman Agent – Convolvulus – is the Latin term for bindweed, and anyone who has bindweed in their garden knows how quickly it spreads and how destructive it is: it takes over and chokes everything else. It’s extremely difficult to get rid of bindweed once you’ve got it, because it’s also incredibly pervasive. On the subject of the Agent himself, Peter Kessler notes in The Complete Guide to Asterix that ‘[t]his is the only adventure that includes a ‘symbolic’ character. Convolvulus, the Roman Agent, is the physical embodiment of social disruption. Injecting him into the Gaulish Village has the effect of a moral tale about the danger of gossip and deceit’ (p. 41).

I’ve chosen The Roman Agent for several reasons: the story is excellent, tightly constructed and beautifully executed. The repetition of a scene involving the village women standing in a queue for fish provides a neat frame for the arrival and departure of the titular zizanie, and of course, it’s very funny: the reader knows there’s going to be a fight as soon as Unhygienix’s fish appear in any Asterix book, and frankly, I’d be hard pushed to name anything funnier than Uderzo’s fabulous drawings of the Gauls slapping each other with fish. In fact, The Roman Agent contains some of Uderzo’s most amusing images: the mother hen and her row of six little chicks calmly watching yet another fight on page 20 for example, and the bemused expressions on the faces of the pirates on page 10 when the Romans are too busy bickering with each other to pay the pirates any attention. The book also has some of the funniest lines: when spying on the Roman camp, Fulliautomatix warns Unhygienix ‘Try not to smell!’ (p. 27); the captain of the ship escorting Convolvulus to Gaul says of the look-out in the crow’s-nest that ‘No one’s to listen to him! He’s been sent to Coventrium!’ (p. 9) and on page 30, Obelix complains ‘No one ever explains anything to me! They just keep me around because I’m ornamental!’ Obelix isn’t the only one in the dark and the writers milk the ensuing confusion for every last drop of humour: the Romans are too thick to keep up with Convolvulus’s plans and no one knows whether they’ve got the magic potion or not.

So we have some tight plotting, lots of laughs, and a couple of interesting touches to boot: Uderzo is always very inventive with speech bubbles and in this book we see the colour of the bubbles change from white to pale green to dark green as the zizanie does his work and everyone gets angry. We also see this happen in reverse: on page 18, Obelix storms out of Asterix’s hut after an argument, but he calms down as he marches away and the colour of his speech bubbles fades back to white before Obelix rushes back to make up with Asterix. On page 36, flowers appear in the Roman Centurion’s speech bubble to indicate a false honeyed tone when he asks ‘Did you by any chance fail to understand me?’ ‘Well, to be honest…’ replies the legionary. ‘Get on with it!’ shouts the Centurion (bold lettering always denotes shouting, of course). And no critique of The Roman Agent would be complete without a mention of the lovely self-referential moment on page 14 when Impedimenta bellows ‘Well, let me tell you that if anyone should ever be fool enough to write the story of our village, they won’t be calling it the adventures of Vitalstatistix the Gaul!!!’ This is just wonderful, because now the reader too is involved in the spreading calumny: on the page following, when Geriatrix’s wife claims that Mrs Asterix, if she existed, should be the first lady of the village, we know this to be true, because the books we read are entitled ‘The Adventures of Asterix the Gaul’ (not Vitalstatistix), so we are forced in this way to take sides. And as a result, we would be in line for a smack around the chops with one of those fish.

As well as the moments that make The Roman Agent special, all the usual things we’ve come to expect from an Asterix book are here too: lots of fights, obviously, including fish fights and cat fights; the pirates, who this time scuttle their own ship; the banquet at the end following one final punch-up; Julius Caesar getting grief from the Senate…it’s all here. And what’s nice about this book is that the Romans provide us with at least as much entertainment as the Gauls. There are gags galore involving psychological warfare (hitting someone with a club), and the Romans’ ability to bicker amongst themselves is seemingly endless. The Romans come out of this book very well, because Convolvulus is the main baddie – but there’s even scope for a little sympathy for Convolvulus. It’s a nicely balanced book and a worthy representative of the Asterix canon.

For more about Asterix on Aunty Muriel’s Blog, see Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge.

Bibliography:

Kessler, P., 1995. The Complete Guide to Asterix. London: Hodder.

Posted on October 13, 2013May 24, 2014 by Aunty Muriel

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books: #4 ‘Eustace’ by S. J. Harris

Eustace is new this year, and it’s astonishingly good. Like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, it’s a work of two halves, although with Eustace I’m afraid both halves are tragic: there’s no happy ending here, in spite of the dramatic turn of events when Uncle Lucien (‘Lucy’) shows up almost exactly half-way through.

The first half of the book is really quite remarkable. Our narrator is Eustace, a terminally ill eight-year-old boy who is confined to his bed. On the face of it, there’s not much scope for narrativity given that Eustace is so ill he can barely move and his room is bare and unfurnished; however, Eustace manages to be an entertaining narrator nevertheless. We learn about his parents’ appalling neglect, his mother’s unhealthy fixation on Frank, her eldest son, Eustace’s dread of physical contact with his aunties, the ghastliness of his boisterous cousins, his ineffectual uncles, and the unsavoury doctor, who, despite all evidence to the contrary, believes Eustace to be a time-wasting malingerer. Eustace addresses the reader directly and it becomes clear in the second half of the book that these theatrical ‘asides’ are, in fact, clearly audible to the others present, and Eustace’s guests can’t understand why the boy is chattering away to himself all the time. The reader is cast in the role of ‘invisible stranger’ rather than ‘invisible friend’ (Eustace won’t allow invisible friends in the house anymore), and we are at first rather taken aback to learn that Eustace’s words are overheard by the characters. This is one of the ways in which Harris goes about breaking the fourth wall, as it were. There’s another example of this sort of thing on page 21 when Eustace tells us that Frank is in the army, but the image of Frank changes in the following frame when Eustace realises that the uniform Frank is wearing as he stands next to the bed is probably outdated. The story constantly draws attention to itself, and we are repeatedly reminded that none of this is real. Free and imaginative use is made of space and frames: for example, parts of the picture fade or disappear, often leaving Eustace stranded and floating in white space.

The pictures fade to blankness when Eustace asks the reader to leave so he can use the chamber pot. The effect of all this is twofold: first, the reader is given a role in the story and is actually addressed as a presence in the room, and second, one is led to ask just how much of what we see is actually just a figment of Eustace’s imagination. A small boy confined to bed has to find some way of passing the time, after all. There is a scene in which the aunties actually start devouring Eustace’s cousins, all of which is clearly in the small boy’s mind: he imagines on page 38 that when his aunties tell him he has a label sticking out, they are in reality pulling at his clothes in order to shove a bayleaf down his back before running to the kitchen to switch the oven on.

And there’s something in the artwork I don’t think I’ve ever seen before – a smaller frame taking up a fraction of the larger frame to suggest not just movement, but a passing moment. On page 143, Eustace begins to address his father, but gives it up as a bad job, and the reader sees in one panel both Eustace’s abortive attempt to get his father’s attention and his angry, despairing expression a second or two later. It’s very effective, and in this instance, very moving.

Eustace’s days are enlivened by the visits of his aunties, one of whom has a splendid left hook and manages to give Eustace a lovely shiner with a blow meant for one of the other aunties. Aunty Nin’s catty remark (‘in that hat, which you wear so relentlessly, my dear, you remind me of one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse – and his horse’) is what sparks the row, and Nin’s retaliatory left hook goes wide of the mark and knocks poor Eustace out. A steak is brought for his eye, and in the pages following, the reader travels with Eustace through his nightmare landscape of the unconscious. Pages 102-105 are the most beautiful and the most disturbing in the whole book. Eustace, still in his pyjamas, wanders through a bleak landscape until he comes across a horribly wounded man tied to a tree with barbed wire. The man has no legs and his blood flows freely. The man is posed as a Christ figure, or perhaps St Sebastian, but he is identified as Frank when men in uniform rumble past in their tanks shouting ‘Three cheers for Frank!’ The family resemblance between Eustace and Frank is so strong that Eustace could almost be looking at himself in the figure tied to the tree. He drives away two crows who are eating what’s left of Frank’s legs and sobs, ‘Oh Frank, what have they done to you?’ and Frank responds with ‘Eustace? That you, old thing?’ Eustace attempts to caress Frank’s poor face, but as he does so, Frank’s mouth melts and in the following frames, his entire body liquefies. Eustace wakes up with a start to find a bloody steak on his face.

Disturbing though this is, the second half of the book demands a stronger stomach still. Uncle Lucy is wanted by the police for crimes of fraud and embezzlement and is ‘lying doggo’ until he can find a way out of London. Uncle Lucy sets up camp in Eustace’s room, and is soon joined by a succession of criminals, whores, pimps and many other characters from London’s underworld. In fact, Eustace’s bedroom becomes The Place To Be, but there is a catch: Uncle Lucy won’t allow anyone to leave in case the police are alerted to his whereabouts. Now everyone is a prisoner in Eustace’s room, and this includes the reader, being, as we are, one of Eustace’s inventions. Eustace was imprisoned before by his illness, but now he is under threat of physical violence if he makes any attempt to leave. All this is very odd and the reader is left wondering whether any of it can be real, but, unreliable narrator though he is, even Eustace couldn’t make this up: an eight-year-old boy as sheltered as Eustace could not possibly be able to imagine the goings-on of the second half of the book. In fact, he quite clearly doesn’t understand what he sees. The reader knows a great deal more than the child-narrator and reads events very differently: we know what Frank and Peter are doing under the bed, and what Uncle Lucy and Oubliette are doing in the wardrobe, but Eustace doesn’t. We read the pictures differently and Eustace is no longer in control, as he was when he re-imagined Frank’s uniform.

The book ends with a newspaper report detailing how the events of the book play themselves out, but this tongue-in-cheek report is obviously not designed to fool the reader into believing that anything narrated here actually took place. Nevertheless, it adds yet another inscrutable layer to this surreal tale. I can’t recommend it highly enough…but be warned: the second half in particular is graphic in every sense.

Posted on October 8, 2013March 9, 2015 by Aunty Muriel · 1 Comment

My Top Five Favourite Comic Books: #5 ‘Gemma Bovery’ by Posy Simmonds

Now, I love lists as much as the next person, so what better way to while away a few of these darker autumn evenings than by writing about one of my favourite things: comic books. Over the next few posts, I’ll be giving you my Top Five plus some extra information about a couple of Also-Rans and an Outsider. I’ll try to avoid spoilers as far as I can, but please be warned that there may be a few here and there. First, straight in at number five is Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds.

I’m a big fan of Simmonds’s other work – Tamara Drewe, Mrs Weber, and so on – but Gemma Bovery gets top five placing for the fascinating conflict generated between the various narrators and narrative levels, and the sheer beauty of the delicate pencil and pen-and-ink drawings. It’s a story told in words and pictures rather than in strips made up of panels, but it’s seamlessly put together so there’s no sensation of being jolted about between text and image: the eye of the reader always knows where to go next. I have a penchant for beautifully executed plain pencil drawings, and Simmonds’s artwork here is truly stunning.

Our narrator is the baker, Joubert, who tells us his side of the story and also reveals to us the contents of Gemma’s diaries which he has stolen from her husband Charlie, so we hear Gemma’s voice weaving in and out of Joubert’s narrative. Joubert, who I think is supposed to be a sort of textually reincarnated Gustave-Flaubert-controlling-author figure, becomes convinced that Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary has some kind of sinister power over the lives of his new neighbours, Gemma and Charlie Bovery, and indeed there are many parallels between the two texts. The more obvious similarities at story level are pointed out for the reader through Joubert, but there are possibly many more parallels at narrative or discourse level that I’ve missed, having not read Madame Bovary for over twenty years. Madame Bovary was considered obscene and Flaubert was taken to court in January 1857, but was acquitted when it was successfully demonstrated that his use of free indirect discourse meant that what appears on the surface to be Flaubert’s words are in fact Emma’s words reported through the narrator. Flaubert could not, therefore, be held responsible for the sentiments expressed.

I’ve mentioned Joubert’s story and Gemma’s diaries, but it seems likely, given the number of scenes that Joubert does not witness directly, that there is a third narrator at work here, linking and fleshing out the two main narratives. There are other texts and voices present too: mainly letters, but bills and faxes also feature alongside examples of Gemma’s artwork, thus the whole story is a complex mesh of competing narratives all held together under the over-arching umbrella of Flaubert’s novel, which repeatedly surfaces in this new and autonomous text. There is a nice distance too between Joubert’s self-deluding narrative and what the reader can pick up either between the lines or from the images: information and impressions which work either to undermine or to flatly contradict Joubert’s narrative. There’s a good example on page 59 when Joubert tells us that he thinks Gemma’s reinvention of herself as The Blonde is a tired cliché; he says he finds her ‘quite without allure’, but the reader can see him in the picture, positively drooling behind his baker’s counter with his eyes popping out of his head. Joubert is an unreliable narrator because he chooses to fool himself and the reader recognises a long time before he does the reality behind Joubert’s rampant voyeurism: he has fallen in love – or, more likely, lust – with Gemma and wishes to replace Hervé (and later Patrick) as Gemma’s lover.

Simmonds has added to the original story of a bored housewife the thrill of a whodunnit, employing the techniques of unreliable narration and repetition used by writers of detective fiction. When the story begins, Gemma is already dead and both Charlie and Joubert are mourning her. Joubert is convinced that Gemma’s death was inevitable because she bore almost the same name as Flaubert’s ill-fated heroine, and Charlie’s subsequent grief-stricken decline seems to indicate that he too will follow in the footsteps of his Flaubertian namesake. There is some mystery surrounding Gemma’s death, however: when Charlie arrives to beg for help on the day Gemma dies, he bears the marks of a struggle – so what really happened? The narrators piece the story together for us bit by bit, but the reader has to balance what s/he is being told against who is doing the telling.

In fact, all three narrators are in some sense unreliable: Joubert because he is self-deluding; Gemma because she is self-absorbed and self-obsessed; the implied narrator behind the ‘camera angles’ of each drawing because the chosen angle excludes all others and thus renders this narrative as selective as the other two. It could be argued that Gemma’s narrative is the most reliable of the three because it is delivered posthumously from her diaries, and diarists are not writing for an audience so tend not to tell fibs. Although diaries are not usually intended for public consumption, writing them is still a selective process because one does self-edit, whether consciously or not. (As a personal aside, I burned seven or eight years’ worth of my own diaries: on re-reading them when I was older and wiser, I didn’t like the self I’d unwittingly revealed in those naïve pages and knew that it would make me feel better if I just chucked them on the bonfire.)

The main character in both books – Gemma in Gemma Bovery and Emma in Madame Bovary – is an impossibly irritating woman, because both women are fantasists and have fed their imaginations on a diet of rubbish literature, poisoning their minds against the reality with which they are faced. Emma reads trashy romantic fiction and she metaphorically regurgitates the literary poison she has swallowed after her death, when black bile pours from her mouth as her body is being prepared for burial. Gemma, on the other hand, reads glossy magazines, and has done ever since she was allowed to peruse such publications in the waiting room of her father’s dental surgery when she was a little girl. Gemma learns of Patrick and Pandora’s marriage from one of these magazines, a bitter moment for her: what she sees is the life she had imagined for herself, after all. But Patrick and Pandora’s marriage doesn’t work either, and the reader realises what Gemma doesn’t – that life as portrayed in the glossies is nothing but an elaborate fake. Gemma, meanwhile, continues to build her castles in the air, as depicted on page 70 in a full-page illustration with explanatory text. (Spoiler: Gemma herself chokes to death on a piece of Joubert’s bread. She too, like her literary predecessor, cannot contain what she has swallowed, either in a realistic or a metaphorical sense. And on another level, G/Emma is once again killed off by Flaubert/Joubert).

It quickly becomes quite clear to the reader of both Flaubert and Simmonds’s text that G/Emma will never be satisfied with what she’s got. And G/Emma is not the only annoying one. Simmonds gives us a whole line-up of fabulously repellent characters: the ghastly Rankins, the awful Judi and her revolting spoilt children, the spineless Hervé and his snobbish, domineering mother, and finally, the borderline sex-pest Joubert.

It’s all great stuff, and it’s my Number Five.

Posted on April 14, 2013July 29, 2024 by Aunty Muriel · 3 Comments

Ghost Stories Part II: The Horror Story in Miniature

In Ghost Stories Part I, I wrote about how the structure of a ghost story can mimic that of a joke, with the final awful dénouement as the punchline. In Part II, I’m going to look at something similar: horror stories in miniature, which work in very much the same way as a joke in that they require the reader to fill in the gaps. And if you have a fevered imagination and you’ve read a lot of ghost stories, you’ll have plenty with which to fill those gaps. When I was an undergraduate in London, many years ago, I spent an evening in the kitchen with a housemate and a bottle of wine, and we told each other every ghost story we knew. After a couple of hours of this, we were feeling jumpy to say the least…so when another housemate returned from the pub and banged loudly on the back door, the two of us in the kitchen screamed uncontrollably. I had to sleep with the light on for a week.

Let’s begin with an old chestnut, a very short tale described as the Shortest Horror Story in the World. I’ve lifted the story and the information which follows from here:

“ ‘The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…’ This two-sentence horror tale is presented as a story within a story, right at the start of Fredric Brown’s ‘Knock‘, published in the December 1948 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Brown describes how the horror in this story is all implied…what could be at the door? ‘But,’ he says, ‘it wasn’t horrible, really.’ He then tells the story of Walter Phelan, the last man on Earth after an alien race called the Zan invade and kill everyone apart from Walter Phelan and the last woman alive, Grace Evans.”

Now, any alert reader can work out that if the last ‘man’ on Earth hears a knock at the door, chances are that it’s a woman knocking. But if you change ‘man’ for ‘human being’ and remove the melodramatic ellipsis, it all becomes much scarier:

‘The last human being on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.’

Okay, now this really is scary because you know that whatever it is that’s knocking is not a human being. You also know that it’s intelligent enough, and knows enough about the customs of human beings, to understand the function of knocking at a door. And finally, whatever it is on the other side of the door wants to come in. Who would have the courage to open the door? And yet, what else could you do? A similar predicament faces the person who knows they are alone in the house, and who, groping in the dark for a match, feels the matchbox being placed into their outstretched hand. Who would have the courage to strike a match in this situation? But the alternative is sitting in the dark, wondering what else is in the room with you. The terror would send you mad.

I found the story which follows on the same website, and you can find other short science fiction stories here:

‘Mike ran in, shouting, “Wait!” but once again, Mike had already pushed the button.’

Whoever Mike is, he’s trapped in a time-loop from which he can never escape.

Of the Six Word Stories, still on the same site, I quite enjoyed ‘Rock, paper, scissors. One life jacket’. This next one, however, gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies: ‘Too young to hitchhike. Darkened roadway.’

I like these little tiny horror stories precisely because you can create the rest of the narrative yourself. The same thing is possible with fragments of other stories taken out of context and subsequently reworked. For example, take the following three frames from Robin Barnard’s Whatmen:

Whatmen is a rich, multi-layered text, and it opens itself to many readings, but I like these three frames in particular: together, they could either form a complete narrative on their own, or they could provide the reader with the opening for a whole set of other narratives. There are many questions one could ask, the answers to which would generate a new story; the same is true of the narratives in miniature discussed above. Here, we see an armed man, wearing a garment that could be a dressing-gown, opening his fridge to find nothing but what looks like a jacket of some sort and a note. The man gingerly takes the note and in the final frame he reads the words ‘Behind you’. Fantastic! The narrative potential here is immense. Who or what is behind the man? What happens next? Why is there a jacket in the fridge? Why isn’t there any food in the fridge? Why does the man look so haggard? What has happened to him before now? And what does the strange symmetrical symbol mean at the bottom of the note? So many questions, so many narrative possibilities…

So, the reader has an active part to play in these little stories. There are questions to be asked and gaps to be filled. And the more readers read, the more competent they become: the horror/ghost story genre is extremely well-developed because it has always enjoyed a tremendous popularity, and as a result, regular readers bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to each narrative. In Part III, I’m going to take a closer look at what part the reader plays in a good ghost story.

My thanks to Robin Barnard, who very kindly gave me permission to use his beautifully crafted images here. If you’d like to see more of Robin’s work, you can view his blog at Images Degrading Forever.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken at Portland Bill by Roy Booth, who always has to take a million billion photographs wherever we go. I like this one though. The menacing sky, the mutilated angel, the gravestone tilting to one side as if the occupant of the grave below had been trying to push its way out…oooOOOOOoooo! …I might have to sleep with the light on tonight.

PS. If you like these very short short stories, Rick Mallery’s Power Shorts Daily are also well worth a look!

Posted on December 23, 2012October 20, 2018 by Aunty Muriel · 49 Comments

Asterix in translation: the genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge

As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the English translation as existed in the original French text, and on occasions, this task required a great deal of ingenuity on the part of the incomparable Bell and Hockridge.

I’ve included scans of the original illustrations – I’m not sure where I stand as far as image copyright is concerned, but I’m happy to remove the pics if requested to do so.

I. The Raft of the Medusa

First and foremost, the visual joke is in the artistic parody of Géricault’s famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa, shown above. The French text draws attention to this parody through the pirate chief’s use of the word médusé, in its phonological resemblance to the word ‘Medusa’. This resemblance is lost when the pirate chief’s words are rendered in English, however: médusé(e) translates approximately as ‘dumbfounded’. So, if the chief’s words are to carry out the same function in the English version of the joke, they must be changed, and the altered version reads: ‘We’ve been framed by Jericho!’

There are two references to Géricault’s painting here: (i) the chief speaks of having been ‘framed’, to mean ‘duped’ or ‘set up’, but the reference here is also to the physical frame of a painting, (ii) Jericho/Géricault: the ingenious translators have even managed to retain the joke based on phonological resemblance. The caption, ‘Ancient Gaulish artist’, alerts the reader unfamiliar with Géricault’s work to the parody of the painting.

The words had to be completely changed in order to retain the joke, but the translated version entirely captures the spirit of the original.

II. The melon gag from Asterix in Britain

The joke in the French version centres on the word melon. In French, ‘melon’ means both the fruit and a bowler hat. A half-melon is similar in shape to a bowler hat, as you can see in the picture. In this frame, the French are mocking the English way of dressing, or at least, the French idea of the English way of dressing: the chap to the left of the frame carries an umbrella, a fact which is discussed by Asterix and his English cousin; the grocer and his customer to the right of the frame are discussing the inflated price of a melon, thus adding the bowler hat to the umbrella, and – voilà! – we have an English businessman.

In English, the melon/bowler hat joke is lost. To keep a joke of some kind in the frame, the melon is no longer too expensive, this time it is rotten: ‘Oh, so this melon’s bad is it?’ This allows the customer to respond to the grocer’s outburst with the words ‘Rather, old fruit!’, thus creating a joke about rotten fruit and the refined speech of the English, as perceived by the French. The elegant and cultured ‘Rather, old fruit!’ is a rendering of the polished response in the French version – instead of ‘Oui,’ or even worse, ‘Ouai,’ the customer replies ‘Il est.’

Unfortunately, the tidy picture of the English businessman is lost. In addition, the coherency of the frame is also lost: in the French version, both sides of the frame work together to produce the joke (umbrella + bowler hat), but in the translated version, the man carrying the umbrella no longer has anything to do with the irate grocer and his customer. Nevertheless, ‘Rather, old fruit,’ still makes me laugh every time.

III. The godwottery joke: Asterix in Britain

The joke in the French version takes the form of a parody of English syntax. In English, the adjective is placed before the noun to which it refers, ‘the white house’, but in French the adjective usually comes after the noun, ‘la maison blanche’. The Jolitorax/Anticlimax character – Asterix’s English cousin – routinely places the adjective before the noun: la magique potion, les romaines armées, a practice which invites Obelix to ask ‘Pourquoi parlez-vous á l’envers?’ Obelix wants to know why this Englishman keeps putting words the wrong way round. In the third frame following this exchange, Obelix mischievously makes fun of Jolitorax by reversing his own word order: ‘Vous avez vu mon chien petit?’ (‘Have you seen my little dog?’) Two things to note here: firstly, petit(e) is one of a small number of adjectives that come before the noun in French (‘mon petit chien’ is the correct phrase). Secondly, Obelix uses the formal vous form, when Asterix characters habitually use the informal tu to address all and sundry, including Julius Caesar himself. Therefore, Obelix is mocking both the syntax of English through his reversal of word-order, and the formality of the English in his use of the vous form. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

Obviously, this joke is not going to work in English. We do not have an equivalent to the tu/vous distinction, and it would not make sense to the English reader if the usual noun/adjective order were to be reversed. To preserve the joke about the way in which English people speak, Anticlimax expresses himself in an excessively formal way, peppering his speech with interjections such as ‘I say,’ and ‘What’. Obelix is led to ask ‘What do you keep on saying what for?’ to which Anticlimax replies, ‘I say, sir, don’t you know what’s what, what?’ (Click on the image to enlarge.)

To pave the way for a magnificent joke a little later, Asterix’s invitation to Anticlimax is subtly and more specifically reworded: ‘viens chez moi’ becomes ‘Come and see round my house and garden’. The French authors poke fun at the English obsession with gardening at several points in Asterix in Britain, and the exchange we see here is the first example of this. Anticlimax replies, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!’ to which Obelix’s rejoinder is ‘What’s wot, what?’ Of note here are the following points:

i) Godwottery – not a word in common use! – means excessively elaborate speech or writing, especially regarding gardens. Hence the use of ‘lovesome’, noted in the COD as adj. literary, and therefore not a word commonly used in everyday speech.

ii) God wot: ‘wot’ is an archaic form of ‘know’, so Anticlimax’s comment could be paraphrased as ‘God knows”.

iii) ‘What’s wot, what?’: an echo of Anticlimax’s ‘what’s what, what?’ in the third frame at the top of the page. This is a joke which works on both a phonological level, because it is an echo, and on a graphological level: Obelix could not possibly hear Anticlimax’s alternative spelling of ‘wot’.

It’s all very clever stuff, and certainly rewards the extra bit of investigation necessary to rootle out everything that’s going on here.

IV. The beer gag: Asterix in Switzerland

This joke is both an elaborate pun and a visual gag. It works slightly better in English because the translators got a little bit more mileage out of it.

In French, Abraracourcix/Vitalstatistix complains ‘J’aurais l’impression de n’être qu’un demi-chef si…’; Astérix picks up on the idea of ‘demi-chef’ for ‘Il est en train de servir un demi.’ This refers to a half-litre of beer, served under the metric system in France. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

In English, Vitalstatistix complains that with only one warrior to carry him, he feels like a ‘half-pint chief’. A sentence is added to his outburst in the next frame, ‘I’m a mild man but this makes me feel very bitter!’ which later allows Asterix to quip, ‘He’s just serving a half-pint of mild and bitter.’ (Click on the image to enlarge.)

The visual gag is of course Obelix holding the chief aloft on his shield as a waiter would carry a tray of drinks, the most elegant touch being the cloth draped over Obelix’s arm: he was going to use this cloth to polish his menhirs but now the cloth completes the picture of Obelix as a waiter. Vitalstatistix, the half-pint of mild and bitter, retains an expression of nobility befitting a Gaulish chief, even though his subjects are quite literally rolling on the floor laughing.

I love it. I love it all. I love it all now as much as I ever did.