The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely… one small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.
Thankfully, some of the best things in life don’t change, like the joy of reading an Asterix album. The next one is titled Asterix in Lusitania, which will see Asterix and his muscular-in-the-tummy friend Obelix and their forever-companion Dogmatix go on their 41st journey.
The magic potion-swigging almost five-feet hero will find time to enjoy the Portuguese sun while bashing up Roman soldiers here and there.
Asterix in Lusitania is the second adventure penned by Fabcaro, whose 2023 Asterix and the White Iris earned praise from critics and a seventh outing for cartoonist Didier Conrad.
The plot is yet to say “peekaboo” but the storyline may feature a hat-tip to the 1971 album The Mansions of the Gods in which the Gauls’s resistance against a looming Roman housing development was seen as putting a magnifying glass on the negative aspects of rapid urbanisation and how small-town tourism works. Those were the days when Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo were around and they added a number of layers. For instance, Dogmatix appeared endearing when he cried about trees being taken down and all characters had their moments to shine in the story.
The backdrop
Having Lusitania as the backdrop is interesting. Today, it is synonymous with Portugal though as a Roman province it encompassed a large portion of western Spain. For the Romans, conquering ancient Portugal represented a way to access the land’s rich veins of minerals such as gold and tin, according to anthropologist Manuel Neves.
It was under the guidance of Mars and to the sounds of war, according to historian Carlos Fabiao, that the Romans arrived in Hispania during the second Punic War. In 218 BC, the Romans disembarked in Ampurias and slowly began to conquer the main towns of the south-western Iberian Peninsula. By the second century BC the Romans had divided Hispania into two provinces: Hispania Citerior (‘Nearer’) and Hispania Ulterior (‘Further’), according to scholars Antonio Carvalho, Filomena Barata and Ana Maria Loio.
During the decade of 60BC, with Julius Caesar’s visit to the province of Hispania Ulterior, the majority of the western Iberian peninsula came under Roman control. A few years later, Hispania Ulterior was divided into Lusitania and Baetica.
Asterix and his friends are asked to help kick out Romans besieging a corner of the Iberian peninsula. “I wanted a country with sunshine, where Asterix has never been,” said Fabcaro.
The album is likely to win the attention of France’s sizeable Portuguese community. “When I told my editor (that it would be set in Portugal) he said: ‘Ah that will make them happy because it’s been a fair while that they’ve been asking for such an album’,” writer Fabcaro told France 24.
The Fabcaro-Conrad touch
Under Fabcaro, the French comic album managed to bring back the flavour of the original writer René Goscinny, who died in 1977. Fabcaro is known for his absurdist humour and is the fourth scriptwriter to carry on the adventure of the indomitable Gaul.
Asterix was conceived in 1959 by Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, who died in 2020. The comic books have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.
Before Fabcaro, Jean-Yves Ferri wrote a few albums. “I was a huge fan of Asterix. This is a great gift to the child that I once was. I want to stay faithful to … what makes Asterix so appealing. With classic ingredients such as the anachronisms, the puns … And especially remain faithful to the characters,” Fabcaro said in 2023. He is popular for his 2015 comic Zai Zai Zai Zai, in which a man goes on the run after forgetting a shop loyalty card.
Didier Conrad worked for the French comics magazine Spirou for a number of years before being handpicked by Uderzo.