Death of Albert Uderzo, the famous designer of Asterix

Text by: Sophie Torlotin Follow

Asterix and Obelix are orphans. The designer Albert Uderzo, who had created the famous Gaulish comic strip characters with the scriptwriter René Goscinny, died on Tuesday March 24, at the age of 92, "in his sleep at his home in Neuilly from a crisis with no connection to the coronavirus, "announced his son-in-law Bernard de Choisy.

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Albert Uderzo concocts the magic potion of success in the summer of 1959. In his modest apartment in Bobigny, this son of Italian immigrants crunches Asterix, Obelix and a whole village of irreducible Gauls.

Born in 1927, Albert Uderzo, already gifted in drawing from childhood, dreams of becoming a clown. With the scriptwriter René Goscinny, met in the early 1950s, he combined his two passions, drawing and humor, by first inventing the parody character Oumpah-Pah the Red Skin, then a few years later the rebel Gauls who are fighting against Caesar.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the booming decades, workaholic Uderzo delivered a page to Asterix each week in Astérix and another in the realistic series Tanguy et Laverdure.

When Goscinny died in 1977, Uderzo decided to take over the series on his own. In 2011, he finally gave up his hand to the duo Jean-Yves Ferri for the script and Didier Conrad for the drawing.

Asterix remains the most famous and sold French comic strip in the world: translated into more than one hundred languages, the albums have sold more than 370 million copies and have inspired 14 films.

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