Over the intervening years since leaving home, I’ve either discarded or left behind a lot of the trappings of childhood. But one of the things that has constantly travelled with me is my modest collection of Asterix books — by no means complete, not by a long shot, but consisting of a number of adventures I occasionally like to revisit.

For those unfamiliar with Asterix — I’m not sure how well known it is these days — it was (is?) a series of full-length comic book stories based in the era of the Roman occupation of Gaul, circa 50 BC. Originally composed by French duo Goscinny and Uderzo and subsequently translated into a variety of different languages around the world, the stories combine a certain degree of real-life ancient history with material that is played purely for laughs to ridiculous effect. Central to all the stories are the eponymous protagonist Asterix, a cunning Gaul who is usually entrusted with his village’s most important matters, and his overweight, somewhat dim friend Obelix who fell into a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and was consequently blessed with permanent superhuman strength.

The books range from relatively small-scale adventures in which Asterix and his friends defend the village from the Roman encampments that surround them to grand adventures that see the indomitable Gauls heading off to places such as India and the Middle East. Elements of sci-fi and fantasy — usually in the form of magic — are incorporated into some of the later books, but the emphasis is always on vaguely plausible but ridiculous situations that poke fun at modern society through the lens of ancient Roman times.

A particularly identifiable characteristic of the English translations — I can’t speak for the other languages — is the sheer number of utterly cringeworthy puns used throughout, usually in the form of character names. Asterix and Obelix are pretty self-explanatory, but they’re joined by village chief Vitalstatistix, druid Getafix, blacksmith Fulliautomatix, fishmonger Unhygienix, bard Cacofonix and numerous others. The female Gaulish characters have similarly unsubtle names — Vitalstatistix’s wife is called Impedimenta, for example — as do the Romans, who usually have amusing Latin names of some description. One story features a centurion called Cumulo Nimbus, for example, while another features an athletic legionary called Gluteus Maximus.

The books are filled with visual gags, too, not just in the panels’ artwork, but in elements such as typesetting and fonts, too. An Egyptian adventure in which Asterix and friends visit Cleopatra, for example, features a number of sequences in which Egyptian characters “speak” in hieroglyphics, for example, while in Asterix and the Great Crossing, which sees Asterix and Obelix initially accidentally discovering America and subsequently coming into contact with some Viking explorers on the way home, the language barrier between the Gauls and the Vikings is represented by the latter adding stereotypically “Scandinavian” punctuation to the things they’re saying. It’s a visual equivalent of the TV series Allo Allo representing characters speaking in different languages through different accents, essentially.

What I’ve been most surprised about on this most recent revisiting of the few Asterix books I do own is the fact that they hold up very well despite, in some cases, dating back to the 1960s. Not all humour ages terribly well and indeed there are certain elements of the Asterix books that clearly come from a, shall we say, somewhat unenlightened age, particularly when it comes to depictions of people of non-white races, but to be honest, there’s a certain appeal to the fact that the early books in particular just don’t give a toss about political correctness and end up being often darkly hilarious as a result.

I’ve never got around to expanding my collection since leaving home, but I’ve now read the few Asterix books I do own so many times to know them pretty much inside out. Perhaps I should look into getting some of the ones I’ve never read — if these ones hold up well enough, then it’d be a pleasure to read some completely new ones that I don’t know at all.