Book three for Asterix is a fascinating one for a few reasons. For one, it's initially a little clumsy, a set of excellent pages not linking together particular well, but it warms up nicely with a horde of running jokes and some glorious scenes in Germania as our heroes incite civil war as cover for the rescue mission they have to mount. The running jokes make this one and every one of them keeps on shining brighter with each iteration or, indeed, escalation.

For another, the Germans, who are Goths here—"Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and any other sort of Goths"—are not phrased in a remotely good light. They ought to be, if not on the side of the Gauls, at least fighting alongside with them in the face of a shared enemy that is the Roman Empire, but that's not the case. Of course, this is a French comic book and one written in 1963, merely a decade and a half after the Nazi occupation of France and, of course, another world war before that, both with Germans as villains. Negativity towards that well-entrenched enemy is hard to avoid.

The story is almost non-existent, but it doesn't need to be much at all this time out, just to set up a loose foundation on which to build jokes. Now that Getafix, the much loved druid in the village of indomitable Gauls, has a magic golden sickle again, after the events of the second book, he can set out for the annual druids conference in the Forest of the Carnutes. It's not open to non-druids, but Asterix and Obelix naturally join him on the journey as protection.

Unfortunately, the protection he needs is at the conference itself, not from his fellow druids, who duly vote him Druid of the Year for his legendary invulnerability potion, but from the Goths, who have a plan. They're going to hide out in the bushes and wait for the competition to be won, then kidnap the winner to take back to Germania and use his magic to invade both Gaul and Rome. The core running joke here is that Goths are nothing except expansion-minded, planning to take over everyone else, but also unable to unite even within their own realm.

Of course, once Getafix is announced the winner, that's who they spirit away, so prompting our two heroes to venture into Germania to spirit him right back again. It's pretty obvious that they could have done so quickly and easily without playing Yojimbo, released only a couple of years earlier in 1961, to set the Goths at each other's throats. However, their goal isn't just to retrieve their druid; it's to nip the German's megalomaniacal schemes in the bud by prompting internal conflict to last far beyond the effects of Getafix's magic potion and thus stop them from invading Gaul. It's trivial to see how important that was to the French in 1963.

And all that undercurrent suggests something a lot more serious than this actually is. Like every Asterix book, this is slapstick situation comedy with a fondness for puns and running jokes and, as the book finds its feet, all of those aspects shine brightly. On the second page, we find ourselves at the eastern frontier of Gaul, where a sign reads "You are now leaving the Roman Empire". We find ourselves there to watch Goths attack Roman soldiers and introduce a whole barrage of puns in character names, one of the abiding joys of this series.

Just as Gauls have names that tend to end in -ix, like Asterix, Obelix and Getafix, the Romans have names that end in -us and Goths have names that end in -ic. So the two Roman legionaries beaten up on the border are named Gastroenteritus and Arteriosclerosus, while the Goths beating them up are Tartaric, Atmospheric, Prehistoric and Esoteric, all working for their chief, Choleric. A page further and Getafix runs into his old British friend, a druid called Valuaddetax, so named because Value Added Tax or VAT is what we call sales tax in the UK.

I should add that the text the Goths speak is in the same language as everyone else, so French in the original, 'Astérix et les Goths', and English in the translation I'm reading. However, it's shown in gothic font to highlight that it's really a different language, just as the sitcom ''Allo, 'Allo' had all its characters speak English in wildly different accents to denote their different languages and often fail to understand each other. Goscinny and Uderzo go a step further than that here, with a glorious translation of symbols serving as Gaulish swearwords into equivalent symbols serving as Gothic swearwords, which, of course, they decline to translate into a language we can speak.

The primary Roman this time out is General Cantankerus, who runs a camp in Germania, but he's largely left out of proceedings. In fact, while there's plenty of Roman bashing here, as there is in every Asterix story I remember, there's less of it than usual, because much of the friendly violent fun involves Goths instead of Romans this time out. That also holds for Goths doing the thumping, as they beat up as many Romans as the Gauls do, and being thumped, initially by our heroes but eventually within their own ranks, so much so that there's a page dedicated to the history of the Asterixian wars, with everyone winning battles over everyone else.

Initially, they play Rhetoric, a slimy Gothic translator, against his chief, Metric, by giving him some magic potion, so he can take over as chief himself. Of course, then they give Metric potion too, so he can fight back. Then they wander around finding downtrodden Goths to power up and spark an entirely new front: Lyric, Satiric, Euphoric, Eccentric and the like. My favourite is a streetsweeper called Electric, who swigs the magic potion and gains delusions of grandeur. With these powers, he can overthrow the government, raise an army and become a general. Oh, yes! General Electric.

I can easily pick out my favourite running joke too, which is how Goscinny and Uderzo use disguises. It could have been the way that our heroic Gauls keep destroying the door of their cell, often right after it's been repaired yet again, but not actually choosing to escape. It could have been the one Roman legionary manning the border between Gaul and Germania who keeps getting upbraided for reporting nonsensical invasions: the Goths invading the Goths or the Gauls invading the Gauls. But it has to be the disguises, because it's quintessential nonsense slapstick.

It all begins when Roman legionaries bump into Asterix and Obelix in the forest and assume, due to them having a Gothic helmet in their possession, namely a World War I helmet, that they must be Goths. They circulate an accurate image of them on a wanted poster, meaning that the Romans start searching for Gauls they think are Goths rather than actual Goths. So they capture a couple of Romans and steal their clothes, prompting the Romans to start searching for Gauls they think are Goths disguised as Romans and thus arrest each other. Obelix cracks up at the idea that they can merely say "By Jupiter!" instead of "By Toutatis!" and nobody will rumble them, but it works. Of course, when the Romans hunt Romans, they switch back to their own clothes, until they choose to disguise themselves as Goths. And so on. It's all absolutely riotous.

And I'll shut up now. For a few pages, this third adventure for our Gaulish heroes didn't flow well and I wondered if it was going to be another book valuable mostly in how it sets up how the series would progress, but it wasn't long before I was absolutely hooked, just as I remember being as a teenager reading 'Asterix' books for the first time and adoring their combination of silliness and slapstick violence. With each further book I read, I found myself looking forward to the next one all the more. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by René Goscinny click here
For more titles by Albert Uderzo click here