René Goscinny: The Man Who Wrote the Jokes
When Albert Uderzo first imagined the hero of a new comic strip, he drew a big traditional Gaulish warrior. René Goscinny overruled him: the hero should be small and clever, and the muscle should be given to a sidekick. That single editorial decision, taken before the first drawing appeared in Pilote on 29 October 1959, produced Asterix and Obelix, and with them the best-selling comic series in European history, 393 million copies by 2025 across 41 volumes and 111 languages.
A Warsaw Family in Buenos Aires
Goscinny was born in Paris on 14 August 1926 to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, Stanislaw Simkha Goscinny, was a chemical engineer from Warsaw; his mother, Anna Beresniak-Goscinna, came from Khodorkiv in Ukraine, and her father had founded a printing company. When René was two the family moved to Buenos Aires, where he had, by his own account, a happy childhood, attending French-language schools. Naturally shy, he compensated by becoming the class clown, which is the standard biography of a comic writer, and he drew from an early age, inspired by illustrated stories.
He finished the lycée in 1942, and his father died of a cerebral haemorrhage that year. He worked as an assistant accountant and then as a junior illustrator in advertising.
New York, and the Company He Kept
In 1945 he and his mother moved to New York. He enlisted in the French Army in 1946, serving with the 141st Alpine Infantry Battalion at Aubagne, where he was made regimental artist, then returned to New York in 1947 and was poor. By 1948 he had found work in a studio alongside Will Elder, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman, all of whom would shortly go on to create MAD magazine. The coincidence is worth pausing on: for a year or two in a New York studio, the future of American satirical comics and the future of European comics were sitting in the same room.
Paris, 1951
Georges Troisfontaines recruited him to Paris in 1951, and there he met Uderzo. The collaboration that followed is one of the most productive in the medium's history, but Goscinny's method was never confined to one partner. From 1955 he wrote Lucky Luke with the Belgian cartoonist Morris, a run that lasted until his death and is generally regarded as the series' golden age. He created Iznogoud with Jean Tabary, and Le Petit Nicolas with the illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempe, a children's series that became a fixture of French childhood. He was, in effect, the writer for hire who defined an entire national art form.
Asterix
The premise is deceptively simple: in 50 BC, one Gaulish village holds out against Roman occupation, sustained by a druid's potion that confers temporary superhuman strength. Everything interesting happens in the language. Goscinny built a comic system out of names, giving Gauls the suffix -ix after the historical -rix meaning king, Romans the suffix -us, and Britons a steady supply of taxation puns, then layered anachronism, caricature and national stereotype on top. The humour was so specifically French that translation lagged for years. It did not slow the sales: the ninth volume shifted 1.2 million copies in two days in 1967.
Editor-in-Chief
After Georges Dargaud acquired Pilote in 1960, Goscinny became its editor-in-chief and launched a stream of new series, among them Les Divagations de Monsieur Sait-Tout, La Potachologie Illustree and Les Dingodossiers. Running the magazine while scripting four major series simultaneously is the fact that most distinguishes him from his peers. In 1974 he went further, founding Studios Idefix with Uderzo, Morris and Dargaud so that they could animate their own characters rather than license them. "It's an old childhood dream that we had with Albert Uderzo," he said. "It took ten years before we could have our own studios and make the films the way we wanted them." The studio produced The Twelve Tasks of Asterix in 1976 and The Ballad of the Daltons in 1978, and closed permanently after his death.
He married Gilberte Pollaro-Millo in 1967; their daughter Anne, born in 1968, became an author and co-wrote the 2022 film Little Nicholas: Happy As Can Be. On 5 November 1977, aged 51, Goscinny died of a heart attack during a routine stress test in his doctor's office in Paris.
Why Rene Is Called a Genius
The specific faculty is comic architecture, and it is easy to underrate because the results look effortless. Goscinny worked in the hardest form of writing there is, the one where the reader either laughs on the beat or the page has failed, and he did it with the additional constraint of writing for someone else's pictures. He solved that constraint by relocating the comedy into language: a self-consistent joke system of suffixes, puns, anachronisms and national caricature, dense enough that adults and children read the same page and laugh at different things. His instinct to make Asterix shrewd rather than strong, overriding his own artist, shows the quality precisely; he understood that a small clever hero generates more plots than a large strong one.
The scale is the second part of the case. He scripted Asterix, Lucky Luke, Iznogoud and Le Petit Nicolas concurrently while editing a national magazine and founding an animation studio, and UNESCO's Index Translationum in 2017 ranked him the twentieth most translated author on earth, with 2,200 translations.
The counter-case is worth stating plainly. This was popular comedy for children, not a body of ideas, and it depended completely on collaborators: without Uderzo's drawing, Morris's Lucky Luke or Sempe's line, Goscinny's scripts do not exist as artefacts at all. His humour also travelled badly at first, being so French that translators struggled, which is a limitation as much as a distinction. And the surest evidence of his gift is negative rather than positive: Uderzo wrote Asterix alone until 2009, and many critics and fans have preferred the earlier books ever since.
Legacy
Goscinny received Sweden's Adamson Award in 1974 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2005. Since 1996 the Rene Goscinny Award has been given annually at the Angouleme International Comics Festival, and on 23 January 2020 a life-sized bronze statue of him was unveiled near his former Paris home, the first public statue in the city dedicated to a comic book author. The most eloquent memorial came from his partner: in Asterix in Belgium, published in 1979, Uderzo darkened the skies and let the rain begin from the exact point in the story where Goscinny had died.
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