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No adult likes seeing his childhood heroes cheapened and spoiled but I really expected better from Albert Uderzo.
The 33rd Asterix adventure, Asterix and the Falling Sky, released this week in 27 countries and 13 languages, drags the garrulous Gaul into the modern age - and falls as flat as Chief Vitalstatistix after his shield-bearers have bolted.
The Gaulish village is visited by aliens that are after the Gauls' secret weapon, the potion of invincibility. The good alien, a featureless Teletubby attended by Superman clones, helps the Gauls defeat the wicked Nagma who seeks the weapon for intergalactic misuse. George Bush and WMD are clumsily hinted at, though the precise lines of the allegory are blurry. What is clear is that the 78-year-old Uderzo (bereft since 1977 of his partner René Goscinny) has lost the plot.
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Uderzo is not acting his age; as Le Monde says: "The sky truly is falling on our heads." It could have been such a happy story. Of 8m copies (a record first print for a comic book) 3.2m went on sale in France, compared to 1.2m copies of the last Harry Potter. It looked like the Gallic answer to Potter: bookshops opened at midnight and reporters vox-popped teenage girls and grown men clutching their copies.
The hype won't prevail. Plonking gormless superheroes in the ancient village is perverse, wrong and jars visually, like a McDonald's restaurant in the background of a Monet landscape. Where once there were glorious dust-ups with pot-bellied Romans, there are now quarter-page pictures of metallic rockets.
This is, like the Gaulish fear of the sky falling, a nightmare come true. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 20
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