Parody, when it is intelligent, can be the best form of homage. This is a sincere, authentic and renewing tribute. Lewis Trondheim is one of the smartest comic book authors out there. He has shown it on solo albums (My Circumstances, Unoccupied, Mister O, Ralph Azham) or in collaboration (The Dungeon, Las poppies from Iraq). However, making an Asterix parody is quite a challenge. With the publication of ¡Por Tutatis! (Astiberri) Trondheim, not only comes out of the challenge well, but also signs one of the best Asterix albums since the death of screenwriter René Goscinny, co-creator of the series with Albert Uderzo.
It's not an Asterix album. It's an album starring Lapinot, a rabbit with long ears and oversized feet who made his name on Lewis Trondheim's 1992 debut album, a 500-page black-and-white tome titled Lapinot and the Carrots of Patagonia. Since then, the author has never completely abandoned the character despite being involved in very different projects. One of the characteristics of the Lapinot series is that the characters are always anthropomorphic animals, along the lines of their admirers Floyd Gottfredson or Walt Disney. Another distinctive feature is that each album can change the time in which it takes place or the personality of the protagonist.
The latter is what explains why it is not uncommon that in ¡Por Tutatis! the protagonist falls –literally– into the universe of Asterix. From there, all the resources that characterize the series are put into operation: the Roman patrols, the magic potion, the characters in the village, the pirates. The album combines a type of humor that clearly derives from the classic series - the puns, although here they are, voluntarily, cruder - with a much more contemporary and typical Trondheim-style comedy - the violence, the parallel worlds of the video game-.
The result is an album full of nods to the adventures created by Goscinny and Uderzo, nods that the fan will discover as the reading progresses. Regular Asterix readers will like the result if they agree to play the game of reading an episode of the Frenchman that is not limited to repeating the usual canons. Indeed, By Tutatis! –with Rubén Lardín translation– goes beyond the foreseeable and presents a parodic work, even irreverent, but executed with ingenuity and that conveys affection for the original series. Whoever approaches the album with this open gaze will discover an adventure that is more authentic, refreshing and, above all, more fun than many of the official albums of the series published after Goscinny's disappearance.
It is not the first time that Trondheim dares with a Franco-Belgian comic strip classic. Years ago, Lapinot himself became Spirou in the episode The Atomic Accelerator, a crazy story that paid homage to the years in which this character was drawn by André Franquin. As in the case of ¡Por Tutatis! Also The Atomic Accelerator was a fun and witty album, written and drawn without copying old models. Funnier than Spirou's 'official' album that he would sign later, Panic in the Atlantic. What invites us to think that the best way to return to the comic strip classics is to do it freely and even with a certain impudence.
