2007-03-20 Cobus Steenekamp

This book is in my opinion a great comedy. One thing that makes it in my
opinion a great improvement of all the Asterix adventures is that it has
completely new and entirely different characters in it. It has almost no-
thing to do with the romans like in almost all the other asterix stories that were written by Goscinny and some others written by Uderzo. There were almost always in by far most of the Asterix adventures some kind of conflict involved in the stories. Then it always went the same way. Asterix quickly drinks some magic potion and then he and Obelix start bashing the roman soldiers and stopping them in their tracks. In some cases at home the whole village's men tackled the romans and always end
up with the romans beaten up and lying around on the ground like corpses,
spears broken, swords bent in all ways, their armour messed up and broken
and shields and helmets lying around and trampled like tin cans. There
is nothing like that in this story. The story follows a completely different path. Unlike the other Aterix stories, this one is a story of
total misunderstanding and confusion. For example. The villagiers and the two roman legionaries haven't the slightest idea how they ended up in the
village when they woke up again. Or why the magic potion has no effect on
their strange visitors. Instead after quite a while it blew the little
blue guy (Toon) up to a gigantic size aswell as the yellow enemy guy when he took off in his space rocket again in the greatest of anger thinking
he was fooled by Getafix and Asterix by not giving him the real stuff.
Another funny misunderstanding is when Asterix was offered a hotdog, he
doesn't think that it could just simply be the name of the dish. He takes
it litterally as it was said, thinking that they truely eat cooked dogs'
meat. I am one of the greatest fans of the Asterix adventures. I love these stories. Through many years of my life I bought and read these books over and over. I have collected all the Asterix books and everywhere I went I always had a book with me. Even when I was still in
school before I was a teenager I always took a book with me and read it
whenever I could - even during class when the teacher wasn't busy with us. I even take these books to work, still to read it when I have a chance. I know these Asterix books like I know my own name and I think this one is by far one of the best.