Albert Uderzo draws Asterix in a video

Watch Albert Uderzo Draw Asterix

(Updated 12 April 2022 to update the links and add more videos.)

As I did with Peyo and the Smurfs, I recently went searching for videos of Albert Uderzo drawing some Asterix characters.

Uderzo has done much more media in the last twenty years than it feels like Peyo did in his whole life, even during the height of Smurf mania in the 1980s.  Either that, or he just did more videos, at least.

I found two videos that satisfy my Uderzo-drawing-Asterix needs.

The first one from 1976 features an interview with Uderzo while he draws Asterix, Obelix, Dogmatix, and Panacea.

Albert Uderzo draws Asterix in 1976

Side note: There’s a chance I wasn’t even born yet when this video was made….

The second one is a similar marker-and-large-sheet-of-paper style video:

That video is excerpted from a longer 50 minutes documentary that includes lots of footage of Uderzo being interviewed at different times. It’s all in French, but do skip ahead to 48:52 so you can see the wall in his house that other artists drew on, including a character drawn there by Goscinny.

Uderzo also appeared on an episode of the original Tac Au Tac series. Even better, he appeared alongside Asterix writer, Rene Goscinny.

The video is blocked on copyright grounds from YouTube, but you can watch it here on the ina.fr website. They’re the people who own the copyright.

Uderzo didn’t draw Asterix on there, but it’s still fun to watch!

He appeared on another episode of the series alongside Gotlib, in 1971. That link now also points to ina.fr in lieu of YouTube. There’s no paywall for the video, but I can’t embed it here.

Tac Au Tac was set to return a few years back, but I don’t know if it ever did.

Really, if you want to see Uderzo in action, just run a search for him on ina.fr and you’ll get 79 videos to sort through — everything from his love affair with Ferrari to a 1966 interview with Uderzo and Goscinny about the creation of Asterix.

Check out that latter link, just for the thrill of how they staged it. Uderzo is inking a page of Asterix while Goscinny is sitting next to him, elbow-to-elbow, typing at 100 words a minutes on a typewriter. It’s entertainingly fake. I alse appreciate the sheet of carbon between two papers going through the typewriter so he’d have that extra copy…

Goscinny and Uderzo being interviewed about Asterix, side by side
Rene Goscinny (left) and Albert Uderzo (right)

I haven’t figured out which page of Asterix that Uderzo is pseudo-inking, though. Give me your guesses in the comments below. The clip is from 1966, which should help.

Oh, and for that video featuring Uderzo’s Ferrari: Check out this screengrab of Uderzo in his office, where a framed photo of Rene Goscinny sits behind him. I love that.

Albert Uderzo in his office in 1980

Uderzo Goes Dutch

Here’s Uderzo walking through Parc Asterix and then drawing during an interview.  As a special bonus, his French is captioned in Dutch and you can still add in YouTube’s built-in translation captioning on the fly for great linguistic confusion.

I’m guessing this is from the late 80s.

Drawing Style

Last year, I posted a video from New York Comic Con that showed how Erik Larsen draws.  His hand positioning with his pen is legendary for blowing people’s minds.

Check out the opening few seconds of this video to see how Albert Uderzo holds his pen when signing autographs.  It’s baffling and awe-inspiring, all at the same time.


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9 Comments

  1. That is amazing. I would never have guessed that Uderzo would draw like that, starting close to his body and then sweeping the pen away from him. It’s also interesting that he starts with the nose when drawing the male characters. Very cool.

    1. Yeah, the part where he pushes the pen away from him was interesting. I’d almost expect that from a lefty, but he’s right handed. Artists are funny creatures. 😉

      1. His only “safe” work was actually in collaboration with René Goscinny for Pilote in a series called Les Dingodossiers, which is very reminiscent of Mad Magazine and the Monty Python for the slapstick humour, but it’s so topical about France in the Sixties that you would need a truckload of footnotes to put it out there to a cosmopolitan audience of 2018. But it’s just as delightful as Astérix in many ways. And obviously very nostalgic when I reread it today.
        Oh btw he is also the co-creator of SuperDupont, if you remember that bit participation from Neal adams in the early days of Fluide Glacial magazine. I believe it was commented in the Comics Journal at the time or something.

  2. The video with dutch subs was from the television course How to draw comics. It was presented bij Hanco Kolk and Peter de Wit. You should check out their colaborate comic Meccano. I’m curious if it’s your thing.

  3. He starts with the nose – exactly the same way I do it when I draw Asterix and Obelix. (And I think the nose is about the only thing I get right)

    That pleases me for some reason.