Asterix and the Missing Scroll (2015)
Asterix and the Missing Scroll Review
Asterix and the Missing Scroll is the 36th volume of the Asterix comic strip series that was written and illustrated by Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad. It’s a surprisingly strong late entry in the series.
In what is definitely a prequel to the entire Asterix series, through complicated circumstances a scroll from Caesar’s book about his war with the Gauls ends up in the Gaulish village. From then onward, it is up to Getafix to tell their own story without Caesar’s embellishments, which leads to that terrific modern-day ending where Uderzo and Goscinny start writing the books about the exploits of the Gauls as their history “really happened”.
This is one of the best Getafix stories without a doubt. It’s entirely about the druid himself and that was fantastic as we rarely see him get such big roles. His insistence that the oral tradition is better than the written one was hilariously misplaced. We even get to meet his former teacher Archaeopterix and those scenes in the forest of the Carnutes were by far the highlights here as they were so pleasingly adventurous, charming and containing almost a fairy tale quality to them. The dynamic between the two druids was infectiously fun.
Caesar was also terrific in this installment and he actually wrote a book about Gaul in real life, so this story was wonderfully grounded in real history. My issue here was that first half that was overly convoluted and not as fun as they could have been, though the Wikileaks references mostly worked. The Twitter shout-out also was funny, but admittedly these references made the story overly modern for an Asterix volume.
Another problem was the weak roles that Asterix and Obelix themselves got within this particular story. It always bothers me when these two are sidelined so much as they should always be the protagonists and the catalysts of any story. But thankfully other characters got a lot to do, including Impedimenta, who was so much fun in another quite proactive role for her. The illustrations here were also stupendous, especially those larger one-page panels in the forest that were just incredibly gorgeous. The color palette was wonderful and so were the backgrounds throughout with many panels being busy with so many characters in them, making for pictures that were intriguing to dissect.
