Happy LXth Birthday, Asterix!

As Asterix turns 60 and stars in a new book, Giles Coren hails the comic equal of Chaucer, Shakespeare and PG Wodehouse

I made some very poor, very timid cultural choices as a child. A bourgeois propensity to cleave to what was safest and least challenging led me to choose the lantern-jawed dorks of DC Comics (Superman, Batman) over the darker, more interesting Marvel guys (Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk); the woolly-jumpered chumminess of Multi-Coloured Swap Shop over the sex-and-custard-pies anarchy of Tiswas; the ocean-going squareness of Blue Peter over whatever the hell ITV’s Magpie thought it was, and so on.

And, as for choosing the cosy, unthreatening uselessness of Queens Park Rangers over, well, practically any other football team on earth, what a fool I was!

But as adults, we are the choices we made as children. They form our identities and we can never escape them. And I regret all of mine.

All? No, one small choice still holds out against the Roman invaders … because I was bang right to choose the Asterix books of Goscinny and Uderzo over Hergé’s miserable Tintin, about that meddling Belgian twerp with his Charlie Brown haircut and his talking dog and the pissed old sea captain and all those words – so many words; such convoluted plots; such dreary colours.

Asterix was much more cleverly conceived: a tight political satire of indomitable independent spirit versus clodhopping imperial power. They say it was about French resistance to the Nazis but we can read it any way we like – I have no doubt Boris Johnson would see himself as both Asterix, with his cunning, and Obelix, with his strength, pitted against the soulless bureaucratic might of Juncker’s Ancient Rome – with a vast geographical and temporal sweep, a huge and colourful cast of characters, dense with classical allusion and full of humour from the knockabout to the incredibly sophisticated.