Asterix may be back, but for Rosita Boland, Tintin wins hands down
You're either an Asterix person or a Tintin person. Sorry, but it's like football teams. You swear your allegiance early and you don't change. You might read both, in the way you'd watch the other team playing on the box, but your loyalty to a particular series is never in question. Can you be both an Asterix person and a Tintin person?
My unscientific poll among friends and colleagues shows this to be completely impossible.
As a child, I read all the Asterix and Tintin books. Several times over. Then and now, I was a Tintin person. What I loved most about Tintin was the way he got around - South America, Tibet, China, Egypt. He went exploring everywhere, including underwater. And he even got to the moon.
I pored over Herge's lovely drawings, mesmerised by the details of ships, Asian street scenes, Tibetan monasteries, Mayan temples. I wanted a dog like Snowy - mischievous, endearing, slightly dopey, and constantly loyal. I loved Captain Haddock's imaginative strings of curses. Also, Tintin was a reporter, though I'm not sure how useful he was as a career model for me as he never seemed to file any stories.
Asterix, by contrast, never seemed to go anywhere, other than pacing round his small Gaul village thumping Romans, followed by his shadow, Obelix, with his trademark stripy pants reaching up to his chest.
They both relied a lot on puns, which I found funny the first time and never again on subsequent readings. And Snowy would have made mincemeat of Dogmatix; the Gauls' tiny dog with the floppy rabbit ears. And there's an Asterix theme park in France. A theme park! I rest my case.
So, clearly, I'm a fair and impartial reviewer of the reissued Asterix titles. Orion is republishing 24 of the titles within the coming year, with eight of them out already: Asterix the Gaul; Asterix and the Golden Sickle; Asterix and the Goths; Asterix the Gladiator; Asterix and Cleopatra; Asterix and the Big Fight; and Asterix in Britain, written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo (Orion, £9.99 each).
The books have been reinked and redesigned, and they also have updated some of the puns. In Asterix in Britain, for instance, after rowing across the channel in fog and rain, Obelix says: "You know what, Asterix? I think a tunnel between Gaul and Britain would be a good idea. Then people could keep out of the rain and the fog on the crossing". Later, in a classic line which demonstrates the state of Anglo-Franco relations, Englishman Anticlimax, when told he is driving on the wrong side of the road, retorts: "Oh no, you're the ones who drive on the wrong side of the road, old boy! Anyway, you'll have to change over on the continent once we've finished digging our tunnel under the Mare Britannicum". Some readers might find these new jokes amusing, but once you start amending a classic text, where do you stop?
I did try, I really did. I read the books again and discovered I liked them even less than I had as a child. The punning names irritated me. Cacofonix, the dire village bard, who ends up gagged under a tree at the end of every book while the ritual banquet goes on. Dipsomaniax, the owner of the Jug and Amphora bar. Krukhut the crook. Edifis the architect - yawn. And while Tintin used his brains and Professor Calcus's inventions to aid him in his adventures, Asterix had the cop-out every time of the Magic Potion that let him thump his way out of every situation. Every silly plot involved silly battles with hapless Romans, who never, ever won, because who wins against Magic Potion?
But hey, there's one Asterix book I really would like to read - Asterix Finally Gets Whacked by the Romans.
• Rosita Boland is a poet and an Irish Times journalist
