Digital Culture Remix Project

For the remix project, I used two pages of the comic book Asterix and Cleopatra, a comic in the “Asterix” comic series. Originally written in French, Asterix is one of my favorite comic series of all time, and the only series of comic books where I have read every issue. I have only ever read them in German, so reading the English translation was interesting because, as with basically all translated works, each translation reads differently even if the underlying story is the same. Asterix comics are set during the height of the Roman Empire, and deal with a host of characters that live in a small Gallic village in modern-day Normandy, resisting Rome by drinking a special potion that gives them super strength and allows them to take on whole legions of soldiers. Each comic deals with a new adventure that Asterix and his portly companion Obelix find themselves in. The comics are light-hearted and exaggerated, but are generally intended for a mature audience, as many of the jokes and references made in the comics require an understanding of certain history and politics. The text is clearly biased towards the Gauls, and portrays them as the heroes of the narrative. This can possibly be attributed to the fact that the authors of the comic series are French, and Gaul was the Roman province that covered most of present-day France. The text also clearly privileges European readers, as they will likely get more out of the jokes and references made, and especially the humorous references to certain cultural stereotypes (in Asterix and the Britons, the Britons play an “antique” version of rugby, in Asterix and the Goths, the Goths wear helmets reminiscent of First World War German military helmets). Many of the anachronisms in Asterix clearly intentional, with the focus being on comedic effect rather than historical accuracy. With my remix, I took a similar approach, and told an exaggerated story in a pseudo-historical context. My remix was intended to be an homage to the style and story-telling of the original Asterix comics, with the audience being people who are already familiar with the source material. The historical inaccuracy of potatoes in Imperial Roman Egypt was an intentional joke to reference anachronisms found in the original comics. The ending of the remix is also a combination of historical fact (ancient Greece had the Olympic Games) and humorous fiction (the soup that grants super powers, the fact that Caesar would care more about athletes than soldiers). My remix is intended for people who know and love the original Asterix comics, and so it is not a resistant fan fiction, but rather one that celebrates the established franchise it is inspired by. I moved many of the original panels of the comic around so that my remix would be familiar but also completely new. The artwork and characters, and even the general story, will be familiar to people who have read the original comic, but I changed the panels enough so that even well-read Asterix fans will find the remix a totally new experience. The remix targets the same audience as the original, and plays into a similar vein of humor, but creates a new narrative by both rearranging the panels and adding new dialogue and text to the story.