No. 67 - Asterix the Gaul

A big hello from me! I hope you're all doing well and are getting through in the best way you can during this time of uncertainty. It's a funny old world, and frankly it all feels a bit like a dream, but as with all dreams we'll wake up to a bright new morning at the end of all this. This week in the UK we learnt that we all had to stay indoors for the time being, and so it's time to fall back on our own resources. For all the parents having to home school your children, I hope you have fun together and learn from each other. The National Literacy Trust has a wonderful resource called Family Zone to help you with lots of useful links and activities to make home schooling a lot easier. Why not check it out! If I discover anything else I'll post it on here. I might also do some more posts with activities and book recommendations etc too, so watch this space!

It's a perfect time to explore new books series, and other types of literature too. I think this post about the Asterix comics has come just at the right time! 

Aside from reading the Beano each week as a child, I've never really been a comics or graphic novels kind of a girl. The first book on this list was The Adventures of Tin Tin, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and you can read my review here. So, I was really glad another comic popped up on the list, and I had a feeling it would be just as enjoyable. As with Tin Tin, I had never seen any adaptations of the stories so I was in the dark as to how the format worked, and what the characters were like. I found a PDF of Asterix the Gaul, the first Asterix comic online, along with all the others, why not take a look! I downloaded it onto my tablet and got reading. I'm not used to reading things on a screen, as I tend to favour a print copy, but a trip to the library was out of the question at the moment! I loved the creasy, battered scan of this comic, it was nostalgic, and reminded me of some kind of archived document. It was almost as good as paper! 

The first adventure of Asterix sees him and his Druid friend Getafix foiling the nasty Romans with a magic potion that makes their hair grow uncontrollably, which as you can imagine is rather funny! Asterix's village remains unconquered by the Romans, at a time when Julius Caesar was rampaging around invading anywhere he could! The Gauls' success is due to another of Getafix's magic potions, one that makes them superhumanly strong! Perfect for fighting Romans! There's classic slapstick, misdirection, and fights punctuated with 'BANG!' and 'BIFF!'; all the wonderful tropes you expect from a comic. The characters are appealing, and the drawing's themselves tell the story as much as the words do. It's great!

Originally of course, this comic was written in French, but it was translated into English in 1969. This meant that a lot of the jokes and names that had been used in the French comics didn't make sense in English, and it was up to translation duo Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge to act not only as translators but comedy geniuses as well! The English Asterix books were praised for keeping the same comedic feel, despite having to be tweaked for English consumption. The character names are the most obvious difference between the French and English editions of this comic. For example, the druid is Panaoramix in the French version, but Bell and Hockridge changed the name to Getafix in the English one, in a reference to drugs and the magic potions he was always concocting! Just from this name change you can see that Asterix doesn't always seem to be aimed at a child audience. In fact, I think they are more for adults than children! The puns are at times so unrelated to childhood that I wonder whether Bell and Hocking, and indeed Goscinny and Udurzo (the original creators) were just trying to make themselves laugh! The Roman centurion named Marcus Ginantonicus is a favourite of mine, for example! There is also a lot of Latin in the English translation. Having not read the French version I can't say if it was in the original, but I do wonder what child today would understand the punchline of a joke if it were in Latin? Is this a symptom of the time it was written? I'm not sure. Latin was certainly being phased out of schools in the 1960s, so I wonder why it was chosen to play such a pivotal role in the text? 

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.", "The fact...", "How are you?" "Very well, thank you!" 

Yes, I had to use Google Translate!

In my last post I spoke about nostalgia, about the way child readers these days couldn't necessarily relate to child characters from the past in an immediate way, but there was always the thread of the collective childhood experience that kept them together. However, with the Asterix's books there is no collective childhood, it relies purely on story telling, adventure and an understanding of European history. This, I think, would make these comics a struggle for children these days.

If the whole story was reliant on the text, I think the adventures of Asterix would have been lost long ago. But luckily, the visual storytelling keeps these books afloat. There is a lot to be said about comics, and I'm going to use the phrase reluctant reader again! Combining words and images helps children find a passion for reading, beyond the picture book, but with the same familiarity. I'm not sure this is entirely true of the Asterix comics, because of all the layers to the narrative, but even if you ignore the text I think you can get something from the story. You can see the conflict between the Romans and the Gauls and get a gist of the action unfolding, as well as the physical humour. I love the simple palette of colours and the way the types of characters have their own distinct looks. As a icon of visual culture, Asterix is right up there! 

Overall, these comics have many downfalls when it comes to appealing to modern children. However, as an adult coming to them for the first time I enjoyed the humour, and using Google Translate for the Latin was quite fun! I'm not sure I'd recommend these comics for the child reader, for parents yes, but if you want a classic comic that will entertain today's young people, I'd stick to Tin Tin instead!

Thanks for reading, L x

Next up, it's J.M Barrie's magical Peter Pan.

No.88 - The Adventures of Captain Underpants!

Captain Underpants stands for "all things pre-shrunk and cottony!" and fights crime using y-fronts! Created by friends Harold and George, the comic book hero comes to life when they hypnotise their school Principle so he believes that he is in fact the pant-clad superhero! Dav Pilkey's wonderfully silly story The Adventures of Captain Underpants is the only book I know to claim to have both 'Wedgie Power' and 'Flip-o-Rama', and what a difference that makes! No, honestly! This is a classic book for reluctant readers! The good smattering of toilet humour is an instant attraction! This particular story includes as rubber dog poo, a evil villain in a nappy who falls foul to said poo (no pun intended), and a good amount of references to pants! It is also full of practical jokes, general mischief and downright silliness. The perfect combination!

When my boyfriend came over on Friday afternoon he found me at my desk whisking off emails to various people and having a think about my upcoming essay (more about that another day). Whilst I finished my admin he picked up the copy of The Wind in the Willows that was on my desk and proceeded to read excerpts to me, with all the voices! This was of course hilarious, so we decided to find other things he could read. We decided that The Adventures of Captain Underpants should be next! He'd read it when he was small and was keen to relive the adventure! So we snuggled up in my room and spent the whole afternoon reading. It was lovely! I faintly remember having read this book when I was small, but I wasn't sure, so I came to it with hardly any prior knowledge. It was great! I think having it read to me, complete with a myriad of American accents (!), made it all the better. I can't imagine having put that amount of animation or expression into it had I read it quietly to myself. He made it really enjoyable! 

So just for you, here is a taster of Martin reading Captain Underpants. George and Harold have just been busted by their Principle for causing havoc at a school football game, uh oh! (If you can't see the video below then you can watch it here)

I asked Martin why the Captain Underpants books appealed to him when he was small?

" I immediately found the idea of it really funny. I loved reading them because I loved the style and the humour and how the illustrations would tell their own mini stories in tandem with the text, like George and Harold changing around the letters on the school signs to make rude and silly phrases. For small books a huge amount was contained in them. The stories were hugely eventful, and each book would include an issue of George and Harold's Captain Underpants to read as part of the story (which resonated with me as a boy because I saw myself in that. I too loved writing). There was also a cool section in each book called Flip-o-rama which involved flipping a page back and fourth to animate two images which was loads of fun. I think the best part of Captain Underpants was that they were just plain funny and I remember the books were a good way of bringing me and my peers at primary school together, as we had that humour in common. "

I too remember these books being a huge hit with boys when I was growing up, and to be fair they probably still are. It has been proven that boys come to reading in a different way to girls, and that often they are slower to pick up the reading bug. The Captain Underpants books seem to be the remedy to this. My experience is that once hooked boys seem to devour the whole series, and come out of it wanting to read. I showed just the cover to my cousin Archie, who's five, and he was instantly interested, I didn't even need to read it! These, and other series that attract boys like magnets, should be treasured! We need more!

I would thoroughly recommend The Adventure of Captain Underpants to any one who fancies a laugh! It is the perfect book for reading aloud and will delight children and adults alike!

Thanks for reading, and listening! L x

Next up Carrie's War by Nina Bawden.

No.100 - The Adventures of Tintin

              

I'll admit to never having read a Tintin book, seen the animated series or watched the fairly recent film adaptation, so I was intrigued to read a Tintin story. Having tried to track down the earliest Tintin book Tintin in the land of the Soviets in the Cornwall library system and drawing a blank, I settled for the earliest one I could find, Tintin in America, published in 1932 and it was brilliant!

Not knowing anything about Herge's creation, apart from what he looked like, and of course that he had a faithful pooch sidekick called Snowy, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story was written in a comic book style! The cute and simply drawn characters of Tintin and Snowy raced across the frames and kept the pace of the story quick and exciting. I was an avid reader of the Beano as a child so it was rather nostalgic to return to the visual world of the comic. 

Written in the 1930s, this story was not awash with political correctness as you can imagine, and stereotyping was the order of the day! During their adventure through America Tintin and Snowy encounter Italian American Mobsters, who all speak with cheesy Italian accents, wield guns, wear sharp suits and an assortment of different hats. He also meets a whole tribe of Red Indians or Native Americans as we'd say, who again speak in stereotypical stilted English, refer to Tintin as 'paleface' and have silly names like Big Chief Keen-Eyed-Mole, and Browsing Bison! To round off the stereotypes there is a Mexican bank robber towards the end of the book, again wih dialogue written in a cheesy Mexican accent and a huge sombrero. It's so bad, it's good! 

I would also like to comment on just how much Herge fits into this 62 page adventure! By the end of the first page Tintin and his little pal have been kidnapped by a very shifty looking milkman, and by page 10 he has escaped kidnap twice, been in 1 high speed police chase, 1 car crash, been to hospital, recovered, been knocked out twice, fallen through 1 trap door, caught a whole gang of gangsters, knocked out 2 others, brandished a pistol more than once, been chased by the police, lost Snowy and found him, received one trick phone call and climbed out of a top story hotel window! And the pace doesn't slow down!! In total there are 5 trapdoor falls in this story, and I'm not accusing Herge of recycling plots but there are 2 drowning attempts, 2 fights caused by Tintin in a bid to hos escape, snowy gets kidnapped twice, and there are 2 gangs of mobsters that Tintin must outwit, including Al Capone himself! 

However, despite these repetitions there are some truly brilliant moments in this book, like all the amazingly fortuitous means of escape for our hero! My favourite was when he gets mysteriously called to a tinned meat factory (it makes no sense in the progression of the story, and I'd have thought Tintin was more sensible than to accept a random and slightly suspicious invitation, but there you go!) and falls in a vat of minced beef, only to find that just as he falls the factory workers go on strike and the machines just happen to stop allowing him to get away without being minced to death! Another moment I enjoyed was the hanging debarcle, where Tintin and Snowy are both about to be strung up when the ropes break, how lucky I hear you cry, but how lucky for it to happen a second time as they try to hang them again! Our hero Tintin really does have luck on his side! 

Other points in the story reminded me of a silent movie, and one of thse suspense filled piano accompaniments would have suited to story down to the ground! The action was so fast paced and the situations so unbelievable that it was all a bit farcical really! At one point, and this was real silent movie stuff, Tintin is tied to some railway tracks and is saved from being squished by a train with inches to spare! 

There are so many fantastic situations in this story and I'd love to sit here and tell you every one but a) we'd be here for hours, and b) I'd hate to spoil it for you! It's a really fun book that keeps you gripped from start to finish, mainly because you never know what's going to happen to Tintin and Snowy next! It's fast paced and the characters are amusing, and with other titles such as Tintin - Destination Moon, and Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn you can understand why they have been enjoyed by children of all ages for decades! 

Thanks for reading, L x

Next up Arthur Ransom's adventure classic Swallows and Amazons.