Lutetia, 12 April 2006 AD.
The first public screening of the film about the men from the North has just begun. Young and old are gathered together! I finally dare to open my eyes and face the scene. Phew! They came in thousands to learn the historical reasons which pushed those intrepid warriors the Vikings to come and find out about fear on Armorican soil! They believed this event, and rightly so, to be vital to their general knowledge. All the more so since the teacher of fear is, of course, Justforkix, chaperoned by Asterix and Obelix!
You haven't seen it yet? Drop what you're doing right away and make tracks to see Abba, the extremely seductive Vikingette, and Olaf, the man engaged to a rock. 90,000 people rushed to cinemas throughout Gaul on the film's first day of release.
By Doubleclix, I knew I could stop worrying (and biting my nails) at around 8.30pm on 12 April... Of the 13 films released that day, Asterix was in the lead! Long live the Vikings! To be fair, the other documentary about the exodus of animals in the ice age, which had come out the previous week, was also drawing in the crowds. Although its thesis attributing the survival of the animal world to a squirrel remains, in my eyes, highly debatable. So it was an educational Easter this year: the Vikings' maiden voyage and the animals' glacial exodus.
Asterix's return to animated cinema, after a twelve-year absence, looks to be a hit. Box-office figures in Gaul for its first week on release indicate great success for this 8^th animated film: 500,000 admissions. We'll give you the international figures later, as high-speed communication isn't yet available in the world of "cinematograf". Initial figures from Belgium, where the film was released one week ahead of everywhere else, are extremely encouraging: admissions rose by 44% in the second week!

No Olaf, I'm not speaking to you! What? No, you aren't engaged to a rock, no. You're strong and brave, absolutely, and you're one of the stars of the film, yes, yes. I promise you. Honestly though, don't you fancy going to find the squirrel from the other documentary and explaining to him how to avoiding breaking up the ice floe? Otherwise you might not be able to make it back home. What? Err, no, my place is too small for you to be able to stay for long...

When our two young men, René and Albert, settled down on that balcony in Bobigny in 1959 to come up with an original series destined to illustrate the magazine Pilote, they had a dream. Their dream was less ambitious than that of Martin the American, but it too was born out of exclusion, intolerance and non-integration. To somehow escape the society surrounding them, they dreamed of amusing others while also amusing themselves!
Their creed was: "let's do a series that will make us laugh!" This just goes to show that although their motivation wasn't very Platonic, it would be risky, young and spirited readers, to view it as totally superficial. After all, when resistance fighters, the indomitable, or countries and governments decide to stand up to the diktats of the strongest and most powerful, who do they base themselves on? Well?!
So it's quite appropriate that Dietmar Bruns, an eminent journalist from Germany's Die Zeit, devoted his column to Albert Uderzo's dreams with a photo taken in Frankfurt last October. Did Albert take a nap which he shamefully profited from? No, the journalist, inspired by a truly original idea, was merely trying to capture what the eyes can't see...

The secrets he gathered reveal that when Albert dreams, he sees colours, colours he can't see in his waking life because he's colour-blind... His dreams often take him back to his childhood, "the best period of his life. Even though we weren't rich, even though there was a war on, nothing stopped me from dreaming!" He remembers seeing a circus poster illustrated with clowns' faces, one of whom was called Albert (!) and bore a big red nose. "It was that Albert who inspired me to create my Gauls and kit them out with big noses!"


Albert also confides that as a child, he often dreamed of Disney. Just like his future collaborator, René, he saw himself drawing rough sketches of Mickey Mouse. "In the last album, I returned to my childhood dreams by creating a character that could be a metaphor for Walt Disney (in fact, Tadsylweny is, as everyone now knows, an anagram of Walt Disney)..."
Albert confided to me that lately he has been dreaming of going on holiday to Brittany with Ada, his very own Panacea, despite the fact that thousands of readers worldwide are demanding a new album from him!... I took advantage of the occasion (you know me) to ask him when... I received a slap that knocked me clean out of my sandals and, when I fell back down to earth with a thud, the answer was "I don't know if there will be another album, we'll just have to wait and see..."
"That'th clear, ithn't it?"

"Well, well," as a certain Mortimer (of the comic book Blake & Mortimer) would say upon reading the edifying article in The Times devoted to the film Asterix and the Vikings! Frankly, the issue examined by the journalist, Adam Sage, is fundamental. Are we, in Europe, capable of holding out against the American Production Line and its multiple factories (Disney-Pixar, Dreamworks, Fox, Sony...) when it comes to animated films? In the reporter's opinion, Asterix is the only one who has stood, and who continues to stand, up to those hordes of 3D films with their clichéd, polished, cloned humour and irreproachable technique.

Put simply, Asterix's aim, and the destiny he represents for European animation, is to put a spanner in the works of the Production Line found in the land of the gobblers, as René Goscinny used to say. Few observers in Gaul would have been able to analyse the project from this angle, which is a shame. No doubt they've already been conditioned... It's just the job for Asterix then: stand up to the dominant way of thinking!

Collector friends, "on your marks, get set, go", because here comes Asterix's 104^th language: Hunsrigger! Coming to enrich Mundart's incredible collection (it'll be the 59^th in their series), Asterix and the Soothsayer has the signal honour of being written in the dialect of the Rhineland mountains. Those Germans continue to make a stand against boredom, my dear Watson!

Although the album of the film Asterix and the Vikings has been, or is to be, translated in a certain number of countries, we would like to draw your attention in particular, dear readers, to the Greek edition of this work, the envy of the Production Line. Tapavuhifigénix, manager of foreign publishing, reports that a tsirosalatas (Greek-style dried mackerel) brawl brought out the Greeks in charge of the film against the Greeks in charge of the book, our publishers at Mamouth.


Though the books have always reproduced Asterix's "logo" as we all know and love it, the film's distributors decided that viewers may not understand it, so they wrote the "logo" Asterix in Greek on the posters... It's all Greek to me, so hand over a tsirosalata so I can taste it!

Moving further north on the European map, there's good news from Poland too: the 33rd album, Asterix and the Falling Sky has been crowned best-selling comic book of 2005 in the land of Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Here you can see a few examples of the elements which accompanied its launch. I have to say, I'm not surprised. A country with such humorous sayings as "drinking or driving, there's no need to choose since we don't have cars", is likely to really understand the wit of Asterix and his friends.
Cheers to our Polish friends! They took my licence off me, so there's no harm in having a drink, now is there?

This week the EncyclObelix welcomes a pirate known for his nice turn of phrase: Pegleg, an expert in Latin quotations, joins his accomplices and Redbeard and the Pirate lookout in the virtual Pantheon of the year 50 BC. The Gaul Jellibabix, brave clandestine chief of Lugdunum, also makes his entrance into the Village, much to the delight of Asterix and Obelix, who haven't forgotten the precious help he gave them in the album Asterix and the Banquet.