Peace and love among the Celts: we read The White Iris, the new Asterix album

“With kindness, you get everything, Obelix…”. Remember Asterix’s wise advice to his sidekick in Asterix Legionnaire. In bookstores on Thursday, L'Iris blanc, the fortieth adventure of our die-hard Gauls, uses this recommendation. It even becomes a precept, a way of living. Imagined by Fabcaro, these new tribulations look towards positive thinking and personal development.

Faced with his demotivated troops, Caesar seeks a solution. He lets himself be convinced by his army doctor Vicevertus to use the method of the new school of positive thought. Her name ? The white Iris. The emperor intends in particular to benefit his soldiers posted near the Gallic village. When the villagers become aware of this philosophy, which recommends “eating five berries and vegetables a day”, “practicing regular sporting activity”, engaging in dialogue rather than fists in the event of conflicts and, above all, eating less of wild boars, a division takes place between the anti and pro-White Iris.

Our heroes battle with cryptic aphorisms. Examples ? “To light up the forest, the flowering of a single iris is enough”; “What does it matter to be in front if your soul stays behind!” These sentences, because that’s what it’s about, Vicevertus throws out at all costs. They captivate some and irritate others. The cover, illustrating the two heroes and the village chief Abraracourcix who are more than circumspect about these new trends, shows which way they are leaning. Unlike Bonemine, the chief's wife who blindly adheres to this philosophy from Rome.

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For their first collaboration, Fabcaro and Didier Conrad managed to maintain the enchanting and sparkling spirit of the saga, which makes us forget the weaknesses of the previous album, Asterix and the Griffin. Faithful to Goscinny's tender humor and his delicious language games, Fabcaro has concocted a scenario in which a delicious language and a moving story are distilled. The screenwriter of Zaï zaï zaï zaï amuses and touches when he imagines the couple Bonemine and Abraracourcix going through a marital crisis due in particular to their differences regarding the doctrine of Vicevertus. To the point of putting their union in danger. Without departing from the humorous vein inherent to the series, the authors portray a moving chef as a husband destabilized by the throes of a wife who, eager for change, reproaches him for his narrow-mindedness.

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Perfidious, Vicevertus takes advantage of this moment of trouble to weaken the enemy in a game skillfully staged by Fabcaro and Didier Conrad. For his sixth album, the designer, worthy heir of the master Uderzo, strives ever more to sketch with his lively and dynamic line the expression of the faces and the gestures of the characters, brilliantly depicting the duplicity of Vicevertus, a manipulator inspired by once by BHL and Dominique de Villepin. His trickery will lead our heroes to Lutèce, populated by “bobos” who admire in Bonemine the simple values ​​of his life in Armorica, for whom “looking at the menhirs” is akin to a healthy return to nature. Peace and love to the Celts!

The reader follows with delight the wanderings of kebranlix. A heroine who is quite doubtful about the works of Banskix and Boltanskix. With what delight too, the reader discovers Obélix handling a scooter with great difficulty or eating in a conceptual cuisine restaurant. L'Iris blanc is a lively album with jubilant humor which makes this new Gallic adventure a truly enchanted parenthesis. Along the way, she finds a bit of that impertinent spirit of Goscinny. This fiercely tender social critique of our contemporaries fulfills its role to perfection: to entertain us.