“Asterix the Gaul”: Collector Volume

Welcome back to The Asterix Agenda. It’s been a while, I know.

I have good news and bad news.

The very good news is that Papercutz fixed one of the two biggest problems they’ve had with their Asterix reprint series so far.

The bad news is the kind of thing that likely will only irritate me, but I’m about to launch into a mega-rant about it.

First, the good news: If you want to read “Asterix the Gaul” in English at full album size in America, this is your chance. This “Collector Volume” edition is even bigger than the album editions from Great Britain that we all know and love.

Look at this enormous bad boy:

It still has the American translation (nobody’s perfect), but the page size, at last, makes it readable. Albert Uderzo put a lot of art on every page, and this is finally an edition in North America that will let that art breathe a bit. I think it’s the same paper stock that Papercutz uses on all their Asterix books. It certainly feels the same and reflects the lights the same. It works in this format, so no complaints here.

Honestly, to me, it’s worth it to pay $19.99 just for a hardcover edition of this size.

There’s no point in talking further about the comic, itself. I’ve been down that road before. I want to talk about the format of this book and the bonus materials in the back of it.

Annoyingly, that’s where the trouble begins.

Asterix the Gaul Again

The History of Asterix

The last 23 pages of the book give you a bit of the backstory on how René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo created the series. It quotes from several interviews with both creators, and illustrates the text with great material from the archives. For Asterix scholars, there won’t be much new here. A lot of this stuff has been printed in other special editions of Asterix in France. But now, at last, we have it in a book on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

I never thought I’d see the day when we’d get anything even remotely approaching a scholarly text examining Asterix. Here we are now. This article is lushly illustrated, including all the original typewritten pages of René Goscinny’s plot. There is also a full sample page of Asterix’s ill-fated predecessor, Reynard the Fox, included with an English translation.

Uderzo draws great animals. I wish he had been able to draw a pure animal funnybook series at some point, but Asterix took over his life.

The text talks a bit about Goscinny and Uderzo’s friendship and work history, starting with their time creating Pilote and Asterix while working on multiple other series. (Uderzo was drawing five pages a week at one point!) There’s a lot of talk about the evolution of the series, starting with Goscinny’s notes from his first conversation with Uderzo related to the series.

The text is sans serif and fully justified, which leads to some awkward spacing issues but isn’t terribly distracting.

And yet —

The Errata

— the text has issues. I thought I was just being nit-picky at first, but the nits kept presenting themselves for picking. Over and over.

Initially, I thought it was a stylistic thing. I write in a much more conversational/blogger style, which is very different from what you’d expect in a book like this. Sometimes, it takes a moment to adjust to a different style. Also, I’m an American, so I do things like not adding excessive “U”s to words like “color” or calling elevators “lifts.” Businesses are singular, not plural. Etc. etc.

This text is definitely in a different style, and that’s OK. What bothers me more is that it feels like this is a direct translation of a French article that could have used another editing pass. Maybe two. There are too many examples of moments where it reads awkwardly, punctuation isn’t optimal, or things are just flat-out wrong.

The credits at the front of the book list Joe Johnson and Nanette McGuinness as the translators. Johnson is the translator Papercutz is using on the albums. McGuinness’ name is new to me, so I’m guessing she translated this text to English from its original French. (She’s also a soprano with a PhD in musicology and a Wikipedia page.)

The French have produced a lot of special editions of Asterix over the years, including extremely large books, black and white books, pencil-only books, editions where the scripts are facing the final pages, etc. I check them out on eBay now and then, but they’re limited releases that are always in high demand. They’re out of my price range.

I’m guessing this text came from a French special edition. McGuinness translated it, but nobody copy-edited it. Nobody wanted this text to be consistent with the way Papercutz has always stepped in to make the series more “palatable” for American readers.

I’ll be charitable for now and guess (again) that this book was rushed into production to get out in time for Christmas. Having created the pipeline (pun not intended) for its creation, they can smooth the process for the next book and do additional proofreading.

Here are a few examples of things that stopped me as I read along:

Latin and French References, Unexplained

The article starts by setting the scene and pointing out the big moments in pop culture that happened in 1959, including some American jazz artists and some French authors and movie makers.

Then, at the top of the second paragraph, there’s a random Latin word:

“Ah, really? Quid about the one that hadn’t yet been named the ninth art?”

It’s a weird place to throw a Latin word in. I get that Asterix inserts Latin phrases randomly. The American translation thankfully keeps them and then provides footnotes to translate them. “Quid” is even Caesar’s first line of dialogue on page one of the book.

It feels weird. I always thought Papercutz was attempting to bring new readers in, Americanize the translations, clean up some of the dated depictions where possible, and appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Adding Latin words to this essay is an odd choice, given that mandate. I’m sure it was in there in the original text in a playful way to reference the style of the series, but it sticks out too much in plain text like this.

There’s a reference later in the text to how Goscinny and Uderzo worked hard on starting up Pilote, buoyed by their own magic potions of “cigarettes and pastis.” I looked it up so you don’t have to — pastis is a French alcoholic beverage. I did not know that.

The first quote from Goscinny mentions a “4CV” that he bought, but what American reader will know that reference? It’s a Renault car, but I had to look that up. A simple “[car]” would have helped.

Quotes and Commas (Commas and Inverted Commas, for My British Mates)

A quote in the next paragraph is broken up with “Albert Uderzo said.” Then the quote continues, but the new opening quote is missing. Remember this one, because we’ll come back to this at the end. It’s the first of a pattern.

Let’s play with commas now for readability’s sake:

“At a time when the press primarily published American or Italian comics, issues from Opera Mundi press agency, or Paul Winkler’s Journal de Mickey, he felt he should offer young readers something new.”

Points for using the Oxford comma there, but the construction of that sentence tripped me up twice before I realized that “American or Italian comics” is the first of three items being listed. It wasn’t that he was complaining about American or Italian comics and then started to list the alternatives.

That might be just me, but I doubt it. There are other sentence construction issues, like the next one:

“He came up with a large-format magazine with news…” uses too many “with”s. Change the second one to “that included” or “that had.”

Still nit-picking? Maybe.

Look what happens as we turn the page:

“To create the latter, he relied on Jean-Michael Charlier, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, co-founders of the weekly.”

Why did we give up on the Oxford Comma after just using it a paragraph ago?!? Now it looks like Goscinny and Uderzo are a single item as a pair, and there’s a third item in the list that is the co-founders of the weekly.

There’s no reason to pair off Udero and Goscinny as a team in this context. Separating them with a comma is OK here.

The text is meant to refer to all three men as the co-founders, and the sentence construction doesn’t works for that. You’d need to invert it a bit: “To create the latter, he relied on the three co-founders of the weekly: Jean-Michael Chartier, René Goscinny, and Albert Uderzo.”

Now that we have the comma situation straightened out, let’s consider a semi-colon possibility.

Character naming conventions are explained in a parenthetical that is awkwardly handled:

“(ending in “-ix” for the Gauls, as with their legendary Chief Vercingetorix, in “-us” for the Romans)”

If you read that out loud in just the right way, it makes sense. You were also lucky that you happened to read it that way on your first try. As a written thing it feels like a rambling mess. Replacing the second comma with a semi-colon works better. Or, get rid of the Vercingetorix example in the middle and simplify the whole thing: “(ending in “-ix” for the Gauls or “-us” for the Romans)”

Help With French History

On page 52, the writer establishes that Goscinny’s apartment is across from the Pantin cemetery. The next sentence proclaims that “little did they know, but roughly 100 yards away, the most important Gaulish necropolis in Europe would be discovered some 50 years later.”

Is “Gaulish necropolis” referring to the Pantin cemetery or a different plot of land? As an American, I am not familiar with French history to this degree. You need to include it in the text.

I would suggest reworking that paragraph to have the Gallic cemetery be a twist at the end and not mention any cemetery in the first half.

Redirection is Misdirection

The first caption on page 50 points to an image on page 52 that isn’t there.

The image that is on page 52 is erroneously captioned as “the first strip.” It’s not. It’s a tier of panels from a one-page gag in Pilote #157 (156 weeks after Asterix debuted) that humorously shows how Goscinny and Uderzo created Asterix. It later appeared in the album, “Asterix and the Class Act.”

This almost cements the idea in my mind that this is poorly translated text by someone who isn’t deeply familiar with Asterix’s history. There’s likely a fine line between “the first strip” and “a strip explaining how the strip was first created” when translating between languages.

Not every translator of every work will be familiar with its full history. It’s up to the book’s editors to make these kinds of corrections. Who is the Asterix historian who is fact-checking this stuff?

In the end, I’m not sure which image that caption was referring to. It might be referring to an image that’s at the bottom of page 49, but I’m not sure. (Maybe the original European edition of this book included more or fewer pages at the beginning, which would explain the shift in page numbers referenced in the text?)

Not all images included with the text have captions. Sometimes they would be helpful. The text on page 54 talks about the initial designs for Asterix and Obelix. It’s accompanied by pencil drawings. I’m assuming they’re all the early Asterix designs, but one or two could have been Obelix. Maybe a caption there to indicate these are all Asterix with the year they were drawn would help clarify that?

Questionable Conventions

I don’t like the name “Collector Volume” for this format. At the very least, it should be possessive: “Collector’s Volume.”

Something like this would usually be named “Collector’s Edition,” which sounds better to my ear, if only out of familiarity. “Collector Edition” would be weird. I Googled the non-possessive form of that and every single result was for the possessive form. Even Wikipedia wants to redirect you to any number of their articles that use “Collector’s Edition” if you type “Collector Edition.”

But “Collector Volume”? It’s too late to go back, but I find it awkward. I Googled it and the closest thing that came back was “Collected Jack Kirby Collector Volume 1.” Sadly, this book didn’t appear on the first page of the results, and it’s the only thing that has ever called itself “Collector Volume”.

I can’t refer to this book as “Asterix Collector Volume, Volume 1” now. That sounds clumsy.

Two other things before we talk more about grammar, which is the kind of thing every comic book reviewer loves to wallow in:

There’s a reference to the “cooking pot” that Obelix fell into as a little boy. Maybe that’s the terminology that the American translation uses, but it’ll always be a “cauldron” to me.

There’s a reference on page 66 to “exquisite corpse”, which is never explained. I wrote a huge article on OuBapo — a similar topic — and I’m still not sure how they’re using it here.

The Tyranny of Multiple Page Numbers

I actually like this next part, though I’m sure it confuses some people. References to the story are given by the story page number, not the book’s page number. If the text refers to an event on “page 23,” it’s referring to the 23rd page of the story. Look for the little hand-written page number in the bottom right corner of the art. It’s not page 23 of the book, where the typed-out 23 shows up in the bottom margin, centered on the page.

I do wonder if it would be clearer if they referred to it as “story page 23” instead of just “page 23.” Maybe I’m getting too nit-picky again?

Apostrophes, Esses, and Possessives

On page 55, we read “René sensed Obelix comic potential,” which is missing the possessive apostrophe on the big guy’s name.

The very next line, however, sparked a debate. The possessive form of the lead character of the series is given as Asterix’. That one stopped me cold. At that point, I had to wonder if the whole world had gone mad or if that was maybe the British way of stylizing the possessive.

I put it out there as an X/Twitter poll. I don’t have that large an audience, but the results showed me two things.

First, most people did side with me and think that “Asterix’s” is the way to go.

Second, the other way did get votes. So someone thinks it makes sense.

I’m blaming the Brits. That sounds like a British thing. It’s also consistent throughout the rest of the essay. I saw “Obelix'” a couple of other times, as well.

Given how much Papercutz has tried to Americanize the series and keep it clear for American readers, though, I would argue that the apostophe-ess is the right way to go. The text should be as Americanized as the dialogue.

I also object to “Julius’s” (top of page 57). When the name ends in “S”, you only use the apostrophe. Is this another British thing?

Maddeningly, in the next paragraph, the word “synopsis” is used as both a singular and plural word in the same sentence:

“The snyopsis of “Asterix the Gaul” — which are shown in the following pages — is the founding document of a history finally written by the conquered!”

That’s a neat trick, isn’t it?

The British might even agree with me on this one.

Simple fix: get rid of the words “which are” and everything works again.

Ending in a Bang! No, Not an Exclamation Mark

Finally, let’s get back to the quotation mark issues I mentioned earlier.

Quotation marks are a real problem at Papercutz. There’s a quote from Uderzo on page 68 that forgets the opening quotation mark:

When the magazine was launched, he had to pencil and ink five pages a week in different styles. It was a true Herculean task! I got to the point that I wasn’t sleeping very much. I wasn’t carrying the fat that I am now, so when I pulled an all-nighter, it showed the next day: I looked like a mess! And when you’re working silently at your desk, hearing only the sound of your brush or pencil, it’s hard to fight off sleep…”

The opening quote is missing at “I got the point…” I think. Maybe Uderzo had the line about the Herculean task, too? I can’t tell because of another in an unfortunate Murphy’s Law-like collection of quotation mark issues.

The final word in this matter comes in the last paragraph on the last page.

There’s a close quote symbol at the end that’s missing an open quote symbol — because it’s not quoting anything! Look, I paired them off to show you:

That paragraph first quotes an interview with Goscinny, then Uderzo. Their quotes are complete, with the proper open and close quotes. That’s followed by a nice quote from Goscinny that includes a quote inside it properly done in single quotes, a closing sentence, and then a stray closing close quote mark that belongs to nothing.

Sigh

This Has To Be Said

I know what’s going to happen next. This article will be riddled with grammatical and spelling errors that I missed. It’s inevitable. It’s the first rule of the internet. I expect more from books than blogs, but I apologize in advance just to cover my tracks.

Also, you didn’t pay $20 for this website unless you’re a Patreon member (join today!). If you are, complain away. You earned it.

I don’t want to be mean about this. Mistakes happen. No proofreader is perfect. I still find errors on this site from 6 years ago that nobody caught. I get it.

However, there are way too many issues here to ignore. Putting aside the ones that might be personal taste, you still have multiple missing or orphaned punctuation marks.

And if you’re going to have British-isms in an American book, then use Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge’s original English translation, too, and kill two birds with one stone. (Be consistent and have the classic translation that everyone loves.)

Leaving on a Positive, Forward-Looking Note

Check out the spine of the book. That’s a sliver of a larger piece of artwork. Looks like Getafix/Panoramix to me.

The plan must be to reprint the whole series in this format to get the whole image stretched across the spines when lined up on your bookshelf. Whether it’s just the first 24 books or all 38 Uderzo-drawn books, I don’t know. It’s a good sign that the plan is to make something bigger work out here. I hope it succeeds.

There is one problem, though: I only have one shelf on one bookcase that’s tall enough to handle this book, and it’s already filled with DC’s Absolute Edition books. This is a good problem to have.

I also like the blue and gold (foil!) color scheme to this cover with the inset showing a framed copy of the book’s original cover. (It’s not the original original cover, though. That’s a later redraw of the cover. Uderzo redid a few of the original books’ covers as the series progressed.)

I want to see this format succeed. I’d subscribe immediately to that $19.99 per book plan and rebuy the series again to have it in this format. I’ll be back with a review of “Asterix Collector Volume” volume 2 (ack!) when “Asterix and the Golden Sickle” gets the same treatment in February 2025.

Scholastic’s website also shows “Asterix and the Goths” set for a July 2025 publication. At that cadence, it sounds like we might get three books a year. We’ll get through the Goscinny era by the end of 2032 and my bookshelf will look very pretty, indeed. If the schedule goes quarterly, then we can hit “Asterix in Belgium” by 2030. Fingers crossed!

The real test will be if I’d buy the book a second time where Asterix rides a dolphin.

(Legal notice: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases from the links provided.)

The Video Version