Asterix’s boss faces positive thinking in ‘The White Iris: Album 40’
Madrid, Sep 4 (EFE).- A new trend has upset the most famous village in Gaul: it is positive thinking, the fashion from Rome that chief Abraracurcix must face in the six comic strips that serve as a prelude to the new Asterix’s album, “Asterix and the White Iris: Album 40,” published in Spanish on Monday.
The 40th comic of the adventures created in 1959 by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo will be published on Oct. 26 with an initial circulation of 5 million copies worldwide.
A sneak peek will be published Monday in Spanish, specially created to give an idea of the adventure that the brave Gauls will face this time.
In it, the protagonist is Abraracurcix, who usually only fears that the sky will fall on his head. Now, in a crisis with his wife, he receives advice that is incomprehensible to him, such as making it clear to Karabella that he is looking out for her – the druid Panoramix tells him – or having “a detail from time to time,” as Asterix suggests.
Although he initially resists as the “mighty and brave Gallic chieftain” that he is, in the end he agrees to “say something nice to him,” specifically the line:
“You shine like a flower at the beginning of spring,” but in reality, he does it to save himself the possibility of sharing a portion of wild boar with her, the “half little detail” that he had considered before her.
The mixture of both ideas will lead him to blurt out to a stunned Karabella: “You shine like a boar ration at the beginning of the banquet!”
For this installment, screenwriter Fabrice Caro focused on the village and its surroundings and returned to one of his favorite plots in the saga.
“I especially like the Asterix comics in which an element foreign to the village is introduced that disturbs its balance. and observe the reaction of the neighbors, with their good things and their bad things,” he said when the title was presented.
He sought the opportunity to study in detail a phenomenon that affects contemporary society.
“The White Iris is the name of a new current of positive thought coming from Rome that is beginning to spread through the main cities of the Empire, from the capital to Lutetia,” he said.
Caesar decides this method can have a beneficial effect in the Roman camps that surround the famous Gallic village, but the precepts of that school also reach the locals who cross their path.
“To illuminate a forest it is enough for a lily to bloom,” is a motivating phrase that can be read written on a menhir on one of the provisional covers of the album that will be published in October, drawn by Didier Conrad. In another, the main protagonists, Asterix and Obelix, observe Abraracurcix under a tree, sitting on the ground with a frown.
Caro also said he was looking for “a title that followed the line set by Goscinny and Uderzo, who often embodied the theme of each album in a physical object or a person” as happened in “Asterix and the Cauldron,” “The Fortune Teller,” “The Great Divide,” “The Chieftain’s Shield” or “The Golden Sickle.”
“Here – he specifies – the lily is a symbol of benevolence and plenitude, or at least that is what we hope…”
“The Adventures of Asterix” began to be published in the first issue of the magazine “Pilote” on Oct. 29, 1959, born from the desire of Goscinny and Uderzo to create an original comic series based on French culture. Since then, 393 million albums have been sold worldwide. EFE
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