The exhibition “The Economy According to Astérix”, which opened on Saturday in Paris at the Cité de l’Économie (Citéco), once again shows the know-how of the creators of the character and his Gallic village, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, geniuses of parody.
It is Citéco, a museum installed in a former neo-Renaissance style mansion, then a former branch of the Bank of France, which is hosting this exhibition until February 26. A new Asterix comic strip is also being released on Thursday, The White Iris, the 40th album of the adventures of the irreducible Gaul. It will satisfy those nostalgic for the original authors, the screenwriter Goscinny and the designer Uderzo, who died in 1977 and 2020 respectively.
The key pieces of the exhibition come from their archives, and are rarely shown to the public. Citéco places a scenario side by side, typed by Goscinny, box after box, action on the left and dialogue on the right, in view of plate 25 of the album Le Bouclier arverne (1968) and the sketch of this plate produced by Uderzo. We also see, even further upstream in his work, a synopsis, also typed by Goscinny, of several plates from the album Asterix Gladiator (1964).
“Goscinny writes everything in advance. It describes precisely everything that happens on each page. Then he goes to see his friend Uderzo, who tells him: “that’s not going well, you want twenty horses but four will be enough”. There is a negotiation,” explains Didier Pasamonik, curator of the exhibition, publisher and comic book journalist to AFP. “Once they have agreed,” he continues, “the cutting is done by Goscinny and Uderzo draws, with great intelligence” and a host of comic details which speak to the youngest readers as well as to connoisseurs. of antiquity.
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The economic approach chosen by the exhibition allows us to revisit the “Gallic spirit” as imagined by the authors: distrust of the powerful, fierce desire for independence, attachment to the village but openness to other cultures. “Lots of Asterix boxes caricature the economy and say a lot about it. If Goscinny and Uderzo are not specialists, just as they are not historians, they ask questions that still interest us,” estimates Christian Chavagneux, economic advisor to the exhibition. The birth of money, the internationalization of trade or the importance of slavery and pillage for the imperial economy, highlights of Antiquity, are thus evoked in the albums, as are subjects more specific to the 20th century: mass production, speculative bubbles, rise of bureaucracy and tensions between employers and employees.