Asterix, Obelix and Dogmatix

The winged helmet and the huge blue striped pants always manage to bring out the child in the severest adult. They have made generations look at wild boars with different eyes. No wonder Asterix and Obelix have as many adult fans as children. But it was a surprise that the two most-well known members of the little Gaulish village turned 50 and no one almost noticed in the city.

Goscinny and Uderzo’s comic appeared in print for the first time in Pilote on October 29, 1959. Uderzo, the illustrator of the series who also took on the storyboard after Goscinny’s death in 1977, celebrated the birthday with The Golden Book, a 56-page collection of short stories recounting Asterix and Obelix’s birthday celebrations.

The whole of France celebrated the spirited Gauls with street displays and exhibitions, with the elite French air force acrobatic team Patrouille de France joining the party. But diehard Asterix fans in Calcutta had to be content with rifling through old books.

For Asterix and Obelix, the mighty, wacky men who retain the charm of their Latin names beautifully in English translation and defeat Caesar’s Romans again and again, have taken a beating from Harry Potter and his peers.

“While we celebrate the release of Harry Potter and have theme events around the teenaged wizard, Asterix is left out in the cold without so much as a birthday cake,” complains Udayan Mitra, a 13-year-old fan of the Gauls, who is also a Potter fan. “I like both Asterix and Tintin, but if you ask me which I enjoy better, Asterix it is,” says the teenager. “Asterix is cool and I like Dogmatix too,” said the Class VIII student who, not too long ago, would pester his mother for a wild boar roast, Obelix’s favourite.

Dogmatix is the tiny dog that belongs to the huge Obelix. He is brighter than his owner, while the diminutive Asterix is pure intelligence.

“The names that have been coined, the fact that a huge creature like Obelix could have a dog like Dogmatix is just hilarious,” says Avishek Ghosh, 26. “The characters are amazing and the fights even more so.” He has been devouring the Gauls’ adventures since he was five.

“Asterix probably isn’t as widely read now,” rues Ghosh, who runs a production house of his own. He puts that down to the lack of merchandise around Asterix, such as video games, which make fictional characters popular these days. “With Potter there is the wizardry that films well but with Asterix, history and humour are the selling points,” says Avishek. (Obelix, who wanted to scale the Sphinx, is responsible for its broken nose.)

Asterix is also getting competition from Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes that are available in omnibus editions. “We sell a fair number of Asterixes through the year,” says Sidharth Pansari of Crossword. But the most popular comics are Archies and the graphic novels of Feluda. Junior Oxford Bookstore says the same. Starmark sells about 10 to 15 comic books of Asterix a day and about 12 box-sets a month. “The sales of Asterix have been static,” says Gautam Jatia, the CEO of Starmark. He adds that many readers feel the newer books lack the humour of the ones penned by Goscinny.

The good news: The Golden Book has arrived in the city, priced at Rs 595. The entire series of 33 comic books is available in a box-pack at a special price of Rs 11,595 from Hatchette India.