The new album of the adventures of Asterix and Obelix is the 39th in the series, and the 5th signed by the duo Ferri / Conrad.
Entitled
Asterix and the Griffon
, it is centered around the themes of belief and fake news.
20 Minutes
read the album before its release on Thursday and was discussing it with its screenwriter Jean-Yves Ferri.
These assholes of Romans got it into their heads to hunt the Griffin, an imaginary creature half-eagle, half-lion, in the Great East of the known world, deep in the barbarian lands.
In
Asterix and the Griffon
, the 39th album in the series created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, our brave Gauls set off for these snowy regions to lend a hand to the Sarmatians, a local people threatened by the Roman expedition. "The theme of this album is belief, superstition," explains Jean-Yves Ferri, who is writing his fifth Asterix album there, with Didier Conrad still drawing. I relied on exact things, or at least on exact beliefs of the time. My Amazon warriors from the Grand Est? The Romans believed in it. My griffin too, but they called him tarasque… Even the geographer Trodéxès de Collagène was inspired by a real character. »And bears the features of Michel Houellebecq.
If he has decided to "respond to the current debate" on the place of women in society by confronting Asterix and Obelix with a matriarchal society where women wage war and men stay at home, Jean-Yves Ferri especially wears his humor serving the debate on fake news and conspiracy.
"I do not oppose the rationalism of the Romans to the romanticism of the Gauls," explains the screenwriter.
We all tell each other stories.
The difference is how you accept reality when it arrives.
"
"Superstition is fairly shared"
Without revealing too much of the intrigue of this album - probably the best of the Ferri-Conrad duo - we can still reveal that the Romans are nagging, idiots and superstitious where the Gauls and their allies are cunning, courageous ... and superstitious. “Superstition is fairly shared, laughs Jean-Yves Ferri. But the difference is that the Romans are disappointed by the discoveries they make because they do not correspond to their expectations, where the Gauls marvel. "
However, this album is one of those where Asterix and Obelix (and Panoramix and Dogmatix, who are also traveling) are most in danger.
“To stick to the theme, I wanted to get them out of their benchmarks.
The decor is very new, they no longer have a magic potion, Dogmatix is gone, Panoramix has a cold… ”Whether through a conspiratorial legionnaire named Fakenius or with the Sarmatian shamans who fabricate stories to protect themselves from the Romans greedy, this album is not kind to contemporary times.
“Romans and Gauls roam a vast unknown world, their beliefs seem natural.
In our time, we have fewer excuses… ”
The Romans on the side of science
But science is also in the spotlight in
Asterix and the Griffon
: the Romans lead a real ethnographic expedition. The geographer who leads the troops is annoyed that the legionaries are bigots and ignore that the Earth is round. The Gauls, on the other hand, are there to help the Sarmatians to keep their territory unrecognized. A distribution of roles which partly refers to the opposition between rational and scientific Romans and romantic and savage Gauls. "This shot has a tough skin," notes Michel Rouger, director of the MuséoParc d'Alésia. It undoubtedly comes from the fact that the Gauls are a people of orality. We imagine that there is no transmission of scientific knowledge without writing. Now we know that the Druids were scholars, philosophers, they knew astronomy, natural cycles. They weren't just picking mistletoe! "
Moreover, if Panoramix is not used much in this album - the noble druid even acts as a jester for end-of-page gags - it reinforces the spirit of initiative of Asterix and Obelix who neither count nor on the potion, nor on the gods, by Bélénos.
Where the Romans, terrorized by the Sarmatians, rely on Diana in a pagan cult ridiculed.
“Gauls and Romans shared a lot of things in their ways of thanking or questioning the gods,” specifies Michel Rouger.
We find similar rites and practices.
There was not one people more "irrational" than the other.
Even the superstition, popularized by Asterix, of the sky that can fall on their heads was shared by many peoples of antiquity.
These Gauls are not so crazy.
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Another hot topic
If Jean-Yves Ferri has therefore chosen the very contemporary theme of fake news and bigotry for his new album, he also slips a few references to the other news of recent months: the coronavirus.
"I make one or two allusions to confinement with puns, and then there is Panoramix who, in a way, seeks a vaccine while struggling to remake a magic potion, explains the screenwriter.
But in truth, containment and the coronavirus don't make many laughs, I think enough books will refer to it.
"
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