The Guardian as usual has published some brilliant appraisals about the legacy of Uderzo.
Goscinny and Uderzo’s cheery comic-book parodies reflected none of the real horror of Roman imperialism – and painted an irresistible portrait of postwar Europe
www.theguardian.com
The way Uderzo’s comic book panels progressed from rudimentary was an important lesson for a child
www.theguardian.com
The French comic-book artist created the beloved character Asterix – scourge of the Roman invaders in ancient Gaul – with writer René Goscinny
www.theguardian.com
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.