Pilote and Asterix

Franco-Belgian Comics: Bande Dessinée

Course 1 · Chapter 5 · Pilote, Astérix and the French Weekly

The first great Belgian magazines were published in Brussels and Marcinelle. In 1959 the centre of gravity moved to Paris, with Pilote, a weekly for older readers edited by a team of writers and artists who wanted something sharper and more French. Its first issue carried a small Gaulish village, and Astérix became the best-selling comic hero in France. This chapter follows Pilote, its creators and the humour of Astérix, with notes on the artists who grew up alongside it. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

A New Magazine in Paris

1959

Pilote appeared in October 1959, founded by a team that included the writer René Goscinny, the artists Albert Uderzo and Jean-Michel Charlier and the radio station Europe 1, which promoted it (check the founders and backers). Its aim was to offer older children and teenagers a weekly with French talent, in competition with the Belgian magazines.

A different tone

The magazine had a lively, jokey editorial voice, a letters page with the editors' replies and a mix of serials, features and gags. Goscinny became editor-in-chief in the early 1960s (check). Creators were encouraged to write for readers who were growing up (check).

A stable of talent

Alongside Astérix, the early magazine carried Charlier's aviation story Tanguy et Laverdure, the western Fort Navajo (later Blueberry, with Jean Giraud, check), and the science-fiction series Valérian by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières from 1967 (check).

Astérix

The Gaulish village Astérix, written by Goscinny and drawn by Uderzo, started in the first issue of Pilote and appeared in album form from 1961 (check). In 50 BC, all of Gaul has been conquered by the Romans except one small village in Brittany, whose people hold out thanks to a magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix (Panoramix, check). Astérix, the clever little warrior, and his large friend Obélix, who fell into the potion as a baby, carry out comic adventures in Gaul and across the Roman world.

The humour. Constant wordplay (names ending in -ix for Gauls and -us for Romans), visual gags, comic stereotypes of other nations and anachronism: a Gaulish village that behaves like a French provincial town.
The history. Goscinny drew on schoolbook images of "our ancestors the Gauls" to gently mock them. Many readers also see a post-war comedy of a small community resisting a stronger power (check; a view often put by critics, not stated by the authors).
The travel albums. From early on, the heroes visited other lands (Britain, Spain, Switzerland, Corsica and others), in each case with national stereotypes presented in a friendly spirit, though the humour has also been criticised as dated (check).
After Goscinny. Goscinny died in 1977 and Uderzo went on writing and drawing the series; further albums by new teams appeared from 2013 (check). Uderzo died in 2020 (check).
Reach. Translated into more than 100 languages and dialects, with sales in the hundreds of millions (check), adapted as animated films and, in 1999, as live-action films with Gérard Depardieu as Obélix (check), and with a theme park near Paris from 1989 (check).

Other Goscinny Series and the Pilote Stable

Work (check each)	Note
Iznogoud (from 1962)	Goscinny with the artist Jean Tabary: a scheming Grand Vizier in a fairy-tale Baghdad whose motto is that he wants to be "calif in place of the calif". Each story repeats the pattern of the plot that fails, with a stream of puns.
Le Petit Nicolas	Goscinny's stories of a schoolboy and his friends, illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé (from 1959, check). Mainly illustrated prose, not strictly a comic, but a classic of the same humour.
Achille Talon (from 1963)	By Greg: a pompous, bourgeois hero with a love of fancy words and an exasperating family (check).
Philémon (from 1965)	By Fred: a boy who falls down a well into a surreal series of islands, a fantasy of the absurd with a literary flavour (check).
Marcel Gotlib	A satirist who wrote and drew gags for Pilote in the 1960s, notably the Rubrique-à-brac series, then left to found his own magazine (see Chapter 6).

The Weekly as a Social Institution

For French readers in the 1960s, the Wednesday and Thursday arrival of the weekly (schools had a day off midweek, check) was a ritual, and magazines such as Pilote were read, swapped and collected. They worked as a stable of serials in which artists tried new ideas before the album, and the editors' voice made readers feel part of a club. When the readership grew up, its tastes moved on, and by the late 1960s Pilote faced competition from more daring publications, a story taken up in Chapter 6.

A British comparison Astérix is also a British success, thanks to Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, whose English translations from 1969 became famous for rebuilding the puns instead of translating them word for word (check). Names such as Getafix for the druid and Dogmatix for Obélix's dog come from this approach (check). Scotland has its own translations of Astérix into Scots, a lively example of how far the series travels (check). The British weekly most like Pilote is perhaps Punch, though for adults, or the satirical Private Eye, in its sense of humour about the establishment (check).

Check the details Dates, founders, sales figures and translator credits are from memory and vary by source; sales totals for Astérix are given in many different ways. Treat the jokes about stereotypes in Astérix as a historical question as well as a comic one, and read the critics' arguments in their own words.

Exercises

Exercise 1

What made Pilote different from Spirou and Tintin when it was launched in 1959? List three differences and say why they mattered.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Choose an Astérix gag type (a pun, a visual gag, a national stereotype or an anachronism) and explain how it works and what is lost in translation.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Some readers see Astérix as a story of resistance, others as a gentle joke about French identity. State each reading, and the evidence a historian would want in order to test it.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Magazine: Pilote (1959), Paris, for older readers
Team: Goscinny (writer), Uderzo (artist), Charlier
Astérix: from 1959, albums from 1961; Gaulish village, magic potion, puns
Others: Iznogoud, Le Petit Nicolas, Achille Talon, Philémon, Gotlib
English Astérix: Bell and Hockridge, rebuilt puns