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In that, perhaps, the closest parallel to the little village in Armorica is Moomin Valley, which likewise offered to a shattered Europe the vision of a magical world from which war and genocide had been banished and вЂ“ in the work of Tove Jansson вЂ“ fused text and illustration to enduringly popular effect.

The joy of it all, though, has long since slipped the specific historical context that saw Uderzo first start sketching Asterix and Obelix back in the 50s. The wooden palisades that surround it offer readers the absolute assurance that it will always hold out, that the tide of history will never sweep over it, that at the end of every adventure there will be a feast, with lots of boar, and no singing from Cacofonix.

All? Not quite!вЂќ The village of indomitable Gauls is possibly the most brilliant antidote to Vichy that French literature has to show. Uderzo, who had lived through the Nazi occupation of France, certainly needed no reminding of what the realities of occupation might be. The stereotypes with which he made such affectionate play in his cartoons вЂ“ the haughty Spaniard, the chocolate-loving Belgian, the stiff-upper-lipped Briton вЂ“ seemed to be just what a continent left prostrate by war and nationalism were secretly craving. No other postwar artist offered Europeans a more universally popular portrait of themselves, perhaps, than did Uderzo. Simultaneously, however, it is also a portrayal of a very different period: that of the decades after the second world war. Uderzo, who was colour blind, much preferred the clear line to any hint of shade, and it was that that enabled his drawings to redefine antiquity so distinctively in his own terms.Д«rilliantly though he draws on the various traditions of Gallic metalwork, or Greek statuary, or Egyptian hieroglyphs to diversify his artwork, nowhere visited by Asterix and Obelix ever slips his ability to render both the Roman empire and the lands beyond its frontiers as belonging to a single, coherent comic world. Brutality had to be portrayed as knockabout a world of mud and gore and fire repainted in primary colours. The challenge was to portray the age of Julius Caesar in a way that was true to the history and yet an utterly joyous recalibration of it.

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Again and again, in illustration after illustration, the visual humour depends for its full force on the accompaniment provided by GoscinnyвЂ™s jokes.Д®qually, though, the conceit that underlay Asterix would have been nothing without Uderzo. What elevated the cartoons, brilliant though they were, to the level of genius was the quality of the scripts that inspired them.

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Uderzo, as the illustrator, was better able to continue the series after GoscinnyвЂ™s death than Goscinny would have been had Uderzo had died first, and yet the later books were, so almost every fan agrees, not a patch on the originals: very much Wings to the Beatles. For decades after the death of RenГ© Goscinny in 1977, he provided a living link to the golden age of the greatest series of comic books ever written: Paul McCartney to GoscinnyвЂ™s John Lennon. Perhaps this is why the news of the death of Albert Uderzo has hit so many so hard. The Gaul of Goscinny and Uderzo is a land of cheery, almost jovial, innocence. The entire theme of the series is the aftermath of a near-genocidal occupation вЂ“ and yet the worst that ever happens to anyone in any of its various books is to be left hanging from the branch of a tree with a black eye and stars revolving round the head. In these, the most vivid display of agony is likely to be a howl of pain from Caesar as Vercingetorix dumps a pile of armour on his foot.

Even less so do the parodies of the painting in which Goscinny and Uderzo, the authors of Asterix, so delighted. The celebrated painting completed in 1899 by Lionel Reyer, Vercingetorix Throws His Arms at the Feet of Caesar, barely hints at the scale of this slaughter. When Vercingetorix, the most formidable of CaesarвЂ™s adversaries, finally surrendered at Alesia, he did so surrounded by innumerable corpses, the limbs of horses and humans horribly tangled, their bellies swollen, their blood fertilising muddied fields. Even by the standards of Roman imperialism, the Gallic war was unspeakably violent. A s a child, devouring every Asterix book I could lay my hands on, I failed to notice what now, with the sombre perspective of adulthood, I can recognise as perhaps the single most glaring inaccuracy in the seriesвЂ™ portrayal of CaesarвЂ™s conquest of Gaul: nobody dies.