Albert Uderzo

Sad. An amazing artist with amazing attention to detail. A successful life.
 
May his soul rest in peace!
Asterix and Obelix was a huge part of my childhood.



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RIP Mr. Albert & thanks to you & Mr. Goscinny for your wonderful childhood entertainment. Really enjoyed Asterix & Obelix along with Tintin . Each character in the comic stip was uniquely humourous especially their names well thought off. Their cartoon styling & humour was unique & difficult to come by in the future.
 
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Sad! Asterix was my favourite comic book character. Wonder what happened to Goscinny!

Sad! Asterix was my favourite comic book character. Wonder what happened to Goscinny!
Just checked, Goscinny died in 1977 at age 51, after which Uderzo continued to write on his own
 
Too many good people going..

Cacofonix..The bard...is what I have named my Lenco L75.

The loud raucous parties at the end..where they tie up Cacofonix and have a feast..was my favourite part of the book.

RIP sir.
 
The Guardian as usual has published some brilliant appraisals about the legacy of Uderzo.



An excerpt from the first essay :
Perhaps this is why the news of the death of Albert Uderzo has hit so many so hard. For decades after the death of René Goscinny in 1977, he provided a living link to the golden age of the greatest series of comic books ever written: Paul McCartney to Goscinny’s John Lennon. Uderzo, as the illustrator, was better able to continue the series after Goscinny’s death than Goscinny would have been had Uderzo had died first, and yet the later books were, so almost every fan agrees, not a patch on the originals: very much Wings to the Beatles. What elevated the cartoons, brilliant though they were, to the level of genius was the quality of the scripts that inspired them. Again and again, in illustration after illustration, the visual humour depends for its full force on the accompaniment provided by Goscinny’s jokes.

Equally, though, the conceit that underlay Asterix would have been nothing without Uderzo. The challenge was to portray the age of Julius Caesar in a way that was true to the history and yet an utterly joyous recalibration of it. Brutality had to be portrayed as knockabout; a world of mud and gore and fire repainted in primary colours. Uderzo, who was colour blind, much preferred the clear line to any hint of shade, and it was that that enabled his drawings to redefine antiquity so distinctively in his own terms.

Brilliantly though he draws on the various traditions of Gallic metalwork, or Greek statuary, or Egyptian hieroglyphs to diversify his artwork, nowhere visited by Asterix and Obelix ever slips his ability to render both the Roman empire and the lands beyond its frontiers as belonging to a single, coherent comic world. Simultaneously, however, it is also a portrayal of a very different period: that of the decades after the second world war. No other postwar artist offered Europeans a more universally popular portrait of themselves, perhaps, than did Uderzo. The stereotypes with which he made such affectionate play in his cartoons – the haughty Spaniard, the chocolate-loving Belgian, the stiff-upper-lipped Briton – seemed to be just what a continent left prostrate by war and nationalism were secretly craving.
 
The age of wit and intellect is coming to an end, the last of its stalwarts are falling one by one.
 
Yes for that there needs to be the environment where you are allowed to laugh and where your wit is cherished and appreciated.
Well, the conversation will take a different turn if we continue on this path. :)
 
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