Asterix’s next album, a humorous fable about “positive thinking” and personal development, will be titled L’Iris blanc, Albert René editions announced on Monday. This 40th adventure of the Gaul with the magic potion is to be published on October 26. The screenplay is signed Fabcaro, for the first time. In the drawing, we find Didier Conrad, who took over the series in 2013 after Uderzo’s retirement.
In this first century BC, the White Iris is the name of a new school of thought, coming from Rome, which advocates benevolence, healthy living, individual fulfillment. Among its precepts: “To light up the forest, the flowering of a single iris is enough. »
The Roman emperor Julius Caesar has the idea of ??instilling this state of mind in his demoralized troops, stationed near the Gallic village which resists in Armorica. What no one has foreseen is that this popular philosophy, which recommends among other things to eat much less wild boar, will enter the village. And divide the pro and anti-Iris white.
“I’m not too new age, but the album is not intended as a critique of this whole movement. As long as personal development has positive effects, why not? I don’t use it too much, but if it works on some people, I don’t generalize,” Fabcaro told AFP.
“I want to treat this contemporary phenomenon as Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny did at the time. For example, in Obélix et compagnie, an album that I really like, they talked about capitalism and corporate concentration, with humor,” he adds.
Asterix is ??a phenomenon in bookstores. Each new album, every two years in the fall, exceeds the sales of any other book. The White Iris should thus be printed in five million copies worldwide.
According to Albert René editions, this series, which began in 1961, has been translated into more than a hundred languages ??and dialects (from Afrikaans to Vietnamese via Latin, Occitan or Swabian). Sales reached 393 million copies in total.
