4. Astérix and the Transformation of the Comics Market René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, Astérix et les Normands, 1966

Published in 1966, Astérix et les Normands is a good vantage point from which to observe the publishing and cultural phenomenon that the series represents. Often celebrated for its remarkable capacity for satirising French society of the Trente glorieuses, I argue here that Astérix is first and foremost a genuine publishing phenomenon in that one of the reasons it resonated so widely in French society was precisely because of its success. Like his predecessors and rivals, Dargaud, the publisher of Pilote, printed four-colour albums taken from this magazine’s pages in print runs of several thousand copies. But the runaway success of the Astérix albums definitively upended the French comics market. With Astérix et les Normands, the series became one of the most important publishing phenomena in twentieth-century France, with sales topping 1 million copies. Astérix provides a way of understanding how the 48-page colour hardback became the standard format for mainstream publishing, triggering lasting change to the sector. Astérix accelerated the shift from magazine to book form, but also to other media, for the success of Astérix was also built on its many adaptations (e.g. radio, records, and cinema) and countless advertising iterations. In other words, Astérix et les Normands enables us to understand the mechanisms by which comics were built up as a mass consumer product, turning children into new consumers of cultural goods.