Bonté Gracieuse!

Letters

Vol. 24 No. 5 · 7 March 2002

From Robert Livingston

Mary Beard notes in her analysis of the Astérix phenomenon (LRB, 21 February) that 'the English can read him as a version of Boudicaa or Caratacus' but seems not to know that it was in this form that the diminutive Gaul was introduced to many British children. In 1965, Ranger, a very ambitious and glossy children's magazine, was launched, and included a comic strip entitled Britons Never Shall Be Slaves. Although four of the original Astérix books had already been published in English translation, this strip transferred the entire cast to Roman Britain, complete with new names (none ending in the Gallic 'ix'). Ranger, a bold attempt to revive the old Eagle format, lasted only nine months, and so the anglicised Astérix soon disappeared.

Robert Livingston
Kirkhill, Inverness

From Nicholas Lezard

Mary Beard seems to have missed an important and obvious point: the Astérix series is as much about the German occupation of France (and other countries) during the Second World War as it is about the Roman occupation. Consider the recurring vexed questions of loyalty and collaboration in the better Astérix books, the use of spies and agents provocateurs by the Romans, and the air of suspicion and paranoia that envelops the villagers when they are most under threat. The allegory isn't rammed home – that's one of the reasons the series is so successful.

Nicholas Lezard
London W12

Vol. 24 No. 6 · 21 March 2002

From Lucia Nixon

There are other important elements in the continuing popularity in France of the Gaulish village and its stand against the Roman Empire besides those Mary Beard suggests (LRB, 21 February). Astérix le Gaulois was published in 1961. The world of Astérix is that of an unchangingly homogeneous native culture rooted in the terrain of France: the antithesis of the disturbingly heterogeneous Roman world with its intrusive languages, food and customs. (All the Astérix books except one end with a banquet of appropriately Gaulish food, consumed by the villagers under the starry sky back home: what better way to depict the internalisation of a common culture?) In 1962 Algeria achieved Independence. In the years since then, France has had to face the usual post-colonial challenges, in particular how to accommodate the arrival of immigrants. French Government responses have included laws stipulating which forenames are suitably French, and forbidding Muslim girls from wearing the hejab in school. At the same time, it is impossible to pretend that French is still the world's second language, as it was in the 19th and early 20th century. A part of France that remains forever Gaulish? How reassuring.

Lucia Nixon
Magdalen College, Oxford

From Yukio Ioki

Nicholas Lezard's point about the more contemporary resonances of Astérix, and Robert Livingston's remarks about Ranger (Letters, 7 March), remind me of the cartoon strip Union Jack Jackson, which ran in the UK comic Battle (rival to the more famous Warlord) in the mid-1970s. Jackson was a British soldier in American uniform in the Pacific, a resourceful tea-drinking hero too busy killing Japs and too loved by the Yanks to be returned to his unit. A North American version was published in the late 1970s in War! comic. There Jackson became a cowardly deserter sponging off the martial generosity of Uncle Sam, a man who betrayed his comrades and never paid his gambling debts. In the original his friendship with Dan O'Bannon, a black soldier, was a unique example of inter-racial mateyness in British war comics; in the American version, Jackson was a white supremacist who would have been more at home in SS uniform. Dan remained, almost to the end, dutifully long-suffering, shrugging off insults that shocked white GIs, yet regularly retrieving the incompetent Englishman from death or capture by the Japanese. It is easy to see this treatment as an extreme attempt to shift blame for the US treatment of black soldiers in the war; the final instalment, with Jackson garotted by O'Bannon on the shores of Iwo Jima, could be read as a back-dated paean to the more militant forms of Black Power. The comic, which ceased publication after three years, was written and illustrated by Luke Besant, a Québecois nationalist who lived nearly all his life in Chicago. His other experiments in Anglophobia included an extended pornographic cartoon of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, an early (and banned) example of the graphic novel.

Yukio Ioki
Vancouver

Vol. 24 No. 7 · 4 April 2002

From Andrew Graham-Yooll

In writing about Astérix (LRB, 21 February), Mary Beard makes a brief reference to René Goscinny's childhood in Argentina. I would like to advance the idea, which others here have also toyed with, that during Goscinny's childhood years he came across the cartoon character Patoruzu, a native Indian and Argentine superhero, the creation of Dante Quinterno, born in Buenos Aires in 1909. The character first appeared on 27 September 1930 (when Goscinny was four), in the evening newspaper Crítica. In 1935 the cartoon was moved to the morning newspaper El Mundo, and in 1936 became the subject of Dante Quinterno's own magazine, itself called Patoruzu. Patoruzu was a nationalist hero, something of a Fascist with a powerful punch which he used to defend the good and the honest, and the true interests of the nation etc.

Andrew Graham-Yooll
Buenos Aires

Vol. 24 No. 9 · 9 May 2002

From Ian Moore

Yukio Ioki is incorrect in placing the comic strip Union Jack Jackson in Battle (Letters, 21 March). The story featured in Warlord. Indeed, the cover of the first issue of Warlord showed U.J.J. himself maniacally spraying hot lead at some unpictured assailants.

Ian Moore
Dublin