The original cover design of Asterix and Cleopatra, by Albert Uderzo, will be put on sale in Brussels on December 10, said the Millon auction house. This 32×17 cm gouache drawing, dating from 1963, is sold by a collector who had held it for “more than 50 years”. Uderzo had offered it “during a dinner with friends,” Millon said in a press release. It is estimated between 400,000 and 500,000 euros.
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Before being a huge success at the cinema, with nearly 25 million admissions worldwide for Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002), these adventures of the Gaul in Egypt were a comic book album, the sixth in the series. It follows Asterix’s Tour de Gaule (1965).
Uderzo parodies the poster for the big Hollywood production Cleopatra, released in 1963, and at the time the most expensive film in history. Uderzo’s Cleopatra takes the same pose as Elizabeth Taylor, Asterix replaces Julius Caesar played by Rex Harrison, and Obélix replaces Marc Antony played by Richard Burton. This drawing by Uderzo was used not only for an advertisement in Pilote in December 1963, to announce the publication of this adventure in the magazine, but also for the album published in 1965 by Dargaud in France and Le Lombard in Belgium.
Asterix and Cleopatra was adapted into a cartoon in 1968. The auction record for an Asterix drawing is also a cover illustration, that of the album Le Tour de Gaule, for 1.449 million euros.
Released on October 26, the last volume of Asterix, the White Iris sold nearly 500,000 copies in the space of ten days.