Man vänjer sig.

After every new Asterix episode, Albert Uderzo swears it's his last, he is tired of it, ha can't think of new stories anymore, he's had enough trying to bring great art to an unappreciative world (he said once) — and a few years later you see a new book out, and sure enough it is nowhere near what he did with Goscinny's scripts. Still, I ask myself whether the latest one, Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête (in Swedish as Himlen faller ner över hans huvud and in English as Asterix and the Falling Sky) is not the worst of the lot. Where his solo efforts (which, come to think of it, span more than half of Asterix' lifetime!) have previously been bland but rather nice (L'Odyssée d'Astérix) to bland and boring (Astérix et Latraviata), this is almost offensively bad. Gone the humour, gone the satire that made Le Devin and Obélix & Compagnie so delicious; instead we get a cute little alien inspired by (close to plagiarised from) Disney, a brigade of "superclones" that look like Superman with Zippy the Pinhead's cranium, a mean and ugly manga-inspired alien who isn't smart enough to be truly evil, and his battle robots. Add stupid roman legionaries who don't get anything amusingly stupid to do, and two panels' worth of pirates (if they know that the Gauls live there, as they should know by now, why don't they make a huge detour around that part of the coast?).

Two conflicting aliens drop down on the Gaulish village in search of a super-weapon (the magic potion), they both try to gain it (the cute Witsledyan by negotiation, the Nagma by force rendered ineffective by his own ineptitude, and I will not award bonus points for figuring out what their names are anagrams of), lots of hilarity should ensue but doesn't, despite Uderzo's frenetic attempts, and in the end they get the potion but, as they're aliens with a different metabolism, they don't get stronger. There is a delayed effect, but not the one they expected (whited out in case you should want to read it after all). I get the impression that Uderzo has no idea of where the story is taking him or what he's supposed to do when he gets there, and the only reason the plot holes are rather small is that there isn't much of a plot to start with. At least it's better drawn than Astérix et Latraviata.

As I didn't expect much from Le ciel lui tombe sur la tête, I am not as disappointed as I could have been. The only thing I am slightly angry about is that most Internet bookstores unfairly list René Goscinny as the author, which is almost an insult to a man who has been dead for 28 years and can't defend himself. I only have these words of advice for M. Uderzo: the next time you say you're going to retire, please keep your word and stop wrecking the good reputation you once deserved.

Oh, and I also bought the new Spirou, Ljudslukaren: a very much delayed translation of Les faiseurs de silence, published in French in 1984. I fully understand why Carlsen never published the three volumes by Nic Broca and Raoul Cauvin: they're really bad. André Franquin, whose 20-odd years drawing Spirou gave him a fully-deserved name as a great comics writer and artist, would have turned in his grave if he'd been dead at the time. If you manage to convince yourself that those two weirdoes are not really Spirou and Fantasio, but two random guys who just happen to look like them, it makes it more bearable, but still nowhere near good.

Despite my negative views of both books, I will keep them as a reference and as an example of how wrong things can go it you don't know when to call it a day.