FRIDAY,MARCH27,2020| THE GLOBE AND MAILO OBITUARIES B17
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lbert Uderzo, a co-creator
ofAsterix, one of France’s
most revered and longest-
running comic book series, died
on Tuesday at his home in Neuil-
ly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. He
was 92.
His death was confirmed by
Dargaud, the former publisher of
theAsterixcomic books. Bernard
de Choisy, Mr. Uderzo’s son-in-
law, told the Agence France-
Presse that the cause was a heart
attack.
Mr. Uderzo and the writer René
Goscinny createdAsterixin 1959,
filling the series with puns, re-
gional stereotypes and anachro-
nistic references to French cul-
ture as it followed the adventures
of its main character, an ancient
Gaul named Asterix, a musta-
chioed figure in a battle helmet.
The series is joined perhaps
only by Tintin and Mickey Mouse
in the pantheon of comic book
and cartoon characters with un-
interrupted universal appeal. In
1966, France’s first space satellite
was named Asterix.
The series has been translated
into more than 100 languages and
dialects and has sold more than
380 million copies since its debut,
according to Les Éditions Albert
René, the company, owned by Ha-
chette, that holds the rights to the
series. It has spawned animated
cartoons, live action movies and
its own theme park, outside Paris.
“It’s a puzzle to me why Asterix
happened the way it did,” Mr.
Uderzo said in an interview with
The New York Times in 1996. “Re-
né and I had previously created
other characters with as much
passion and enthusiasm, but only
Asterix was a hit.”
“I think it’s perhaps because
everyone recognizes himself in
the characters,” Mr. Uderzo add-
ed. “The idea of the weak who de-
feat the strong appeals. After all,
we all have someone stronger
lording itover us:the govern-
ment, the police, the tax collec-
tor.”
Drawn by Mr. Uderzo in an ex-
aggerated style – with overblown
physical attributes such as bul-
bous noses – the series features a
village of unruly Gauls resisting
Roman dominion in 50 BC with
the help of a magic potion that
grants superhuman strength.
Asterix, short but crafty, is al-
ways flanked by his rotund
friend, Obelix, and his loyal dog,
Dogmatix, as the trio repeatedly
foil Julius Caesar’s plans in ex-
ploits that take them from En-
gland to Ancient Egypt. The he-
ro’s name, like almost all of those
in the series, is a pun ending in
“ix” – in his case, on the word as-
terisk.
Mr. Uderzo and Mr. Goscinny,
who met in 1951, worked at a fren-
zied pace, collaborating until
1977, when Mr. Goscinny died of a
heart attack. Mr. Uderzo took
over the series and retired in 2011.
Some critics said the quality of
the writing dropped after Mr. Gos-
cinny’s death, but the series’ suc-cess continued unabated.
Anne Goscinny, Mr. Goscinny’s
daughter, told Le Parisien news-
paper on Wednesday that the two
were like “brothers.”
“They were as different as fire
and water, but they lived some-
thing that few of us will be able to
live,” she said.
Mr. Uderzo created Les Édi-
tions Albert René two years after
Mr. Goscinny’s death, after a con-
flict with Dargaud, the pair’s orig-
inal publishing house. Mr. Uderzo
also waged a long legal battle
with his only daughter, Sylvie
Uderzo, over his literary estate.
The two reconciled in 2014.
He leaves her, along with his
wife, Ada Milani; his brother,
Marcel, who is also a cartoonist;
and several grandchildren.
TheAsterixseries is now being
written by Jean-Yves Ferri and
drawn by Didier Conrad. The lat-
est comic book, issued last year, is
the first to feature a female hero-
ine, Adrenaline, the teenagedaughter of Vercingetorix, the
historical chieftain who led the
Gauls to rebel against Julius Cae-
sar.
President Emmanuel Macron
of France said in a statement on
Wednesday that Asterix and Obe-
lix were now “orphans of their
creator, and France of one of this
century’s most creative imagina-
tions.”
Alberto Aleandro Uderzo was
born on April 25, 1927, in Fismes,
in eastern France, with 12 fingers –
“a nod from destiny to the talent
that would soon overflow from
his hands,” Macron said – but an
operation fixed the anomaly.
Uderzo grew up in the Paris ar-
ea, the son of Silvio Leonardo
Uderzo, a carpenter, and Iria
(Crestini) Uderzo, both Italian
immigrants. He quickly took to
drawing.
As a young man, Alberto was
an assistant to an instrument
maker, a welder and then an illus-
trator in an animation studio. Hecreated his first comic characters,
for a youth magazine called OK,
in 1946. Mr. Uderzo, who counted
Walt Disney as one of his biggest
inspirations, told the newspaper
Le Monde in 2017 that “the Amer-
icans taught me how to draw.”
After his mandatory military
service, Uderzo drew illustrations
for French newspapers before be-
ing hired as a cartoonist in the Pa-
ris offices of a Belgian agency that
distributed comics. It was at the
agency that he met Mr. Goscinny.
The two got along well and col-
laborated on a number of comics,
includingOompah-pah, a humor-
ous series set in colonial America
that was briefly serialized in the
magazine Tintin. But Mr. Uderzo
was a skilled illustrator who also
mastered a more realistic style of
drawing, and he worked – with-
out Mr. Goscinny – on comic
books such asTanguy and Laver-
dure, about the adventures of two
French air force pilots.
In 1959, Mr. Uderzo and Mr.
Goscinny were part of the team
that created Pilote, a new youth
magazine that would go on to fea-
ture some of the era’s most talent-
ed French and Belgian comic
book artists.
François Clauteaux, the creator
of Pilote, wanted a comic-book
series that would be deeply
French and stand out in an era of
invading American comics, Mr.
Uderzo told Europe 1 radio in
2008.
Mr. Uderzo and Mr. Goscinny
initially thought of adapting the
Roman de Renart, a series of me-
dieval fables featuring anthropo-
morphic characters. But some-
one else had already taken the
idea and, pressed for time as the
deadline for Pilote’s first issue
loomed, the pair had an idea.
“What is more French than our
ancestors the Gauls?” Mr. Uderzo
said.
“Within 15 minutes, we had
imagined everything: the druid,
the bard, the names that end in
‘ix,’ because of Vercingetorix, of
course.”NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICEALBERTUDERZO
ILLUSTRATOR,92CARTOONISTWASCO-CREATOROF
WILDLYPOPULARANDREVEREDSERIES
WithwriterRenéGoscinny,hebroughtAsterix–aboutanancientGaulandhisrotundfriend,Obelix–tolifewithFrenchculture
AURÉLIENBREEDENPARIS
FrenchillustratorAlbertUderzoposeswithsomeofhischaracters–Asterix,left,Miraculix,centre,andObelix
–atanawardsceremonyinErlangen,southernGermany,in2004.FRANKBOXLER/ASSOCIATEDPRESSA
lfred Worden, who orbited
the moon in the summer of
1971, taking sophisticated
photographs of the lunar terrain
while his fellow astronauts of the
Apollo 15 mission roamed its sur-
face in a newly developed four-
wheel rover, died on March 18 at
an assisted living centre in Sugar
Land, Tex., his family said. He was
88.
His son-in-law Bill Penczak
said that Mr. Worden, who had
lived in League City, Tex., appar-
ently had a stroke.
Apollo 15 was NASA’s first
moon mission devoted mainly to
science. The flight of Apollo 11 in
July, 1969, had fulfilled president
John F. Kennedy’s call for America
to reach the moon by the end of
the 1960s. But the three lunar
landings that preceded Apollo 15
had yielded relatively modest in-
sight into the moon’s origin and
composition.
Mr. Worden, a major in the U.S.
Air Force, spent three days in orbit
operating a pair of cameras in his
space capsule Endeavour.
Those photos provided the
sharpest images ever taken of the
moon, an achievement that led to
the mapping of its rugged terrain.
Mr. Worden also operated an ex-
tensive package of instruments to
enhance knowledge of space and
the moon itself.
En route home, he released a
“subsatellite” – carried by Endeav-
our and weighing about 35 kilo-
grams – that was designed to orbit
the moon for at least a year and ra-
dio back data on its gravitational
field and other technical informa-
tion. It was the first time such a
space vehicle had been deployed.
He also undertook the first
walk in deep space, spending 38
minutes tethered to Endeavour
while more than 315,000 kilo-
metres from Earth as he retrieved
canisters of film attached to the
skin of the craft.
The other Apollo 15 crewmen –Colonel David Scott and Lieuten-
ant-Colonel James Irwin, also air
force officers – became the sev-
enth and eighth men to land on
the moon, having descended in
their Lunar Module, Falcon, from
the space capsule piloted by Mr.
Worden. They spent 18^1 ⁄ 2 hours ex-
ploring its surface and covered
about 28 kilometres in their rover- both NASA records – and return-
ed to the capsule for the flight
home with 77 kilograms of rock
and soil samples.
The mission was pronounced a
success, but NASA later repri-
manded the three astronauts for
“poor judgment” by seeking to
profit from their fame.
They had carried aboard the
Apollo 15 craft several hundred
specially stamped, signed and
cancelled envelopes commemo-
rating the flight and sought to sell
them through a West German
stamp dealer. Under the deal, a to-
tal of US$21,000 was to be set
aside for trust funds to benefit the
astronauts’ children, but any pro-
ceeds the astronauts themselves
would receive were to be deferred
because they were still in the
Apollo program.
The deal became public, and
while the astronauts withdrew
from it, with no funds going to
them or their children, NASA was
embarrassed and dropped all
three from flight status. Mr. Word-
en and Mr. Scott were reassigned
to desk jobs. Mr. Irwin had already
planned to retire.
In July, 1983, responding to a
lawsuit filed by Mr. Worden, the
federalgovernment returned 359
stamped envelopes that NASA
had seized from the astronauts,
concluding that the space agency
had either authorized their being
brought aboard the Apollo 15
spacecraft or had known that they
were taken on the flight. But Mr.
Worden was remorseful.
“No one was really supposed to
arrange to make money from the
program while they were still in,”
he later wrote. “Even if I didn’t
break any formal rules, in hind-sight I had broken an unspoken
trust.”
Alfred Merrill Worden was born
Feb. 7, 1932, outside Jackson,
Mich., and grew up on a 10-acre
farm that yielded little profit for
his parents, Merrill and Helen
Worden. One of six children, he
took on many farm chores as he
grew older but saw no future in
that line of work.
He received a one-year scholar-
ship to the University of Michigan,
but when his funding ran out he
applied to Annapolis and West
Point, having learned that they
provided free educations. He
chose the U.S. Military Academy,
graduated in 1955, then joined the
Air Force.
After graduating from flight
school, he piloted fighter jets
stateside, then obtained master’s
degrees in space science and engi-
neering from Michigan in 1963. He
became a test pilot and instructor
afterward, then joined NASA’s as-
tronaut corps in 1966.
He was a senior executive at
NASA’s Ames Research Center
from 1972 to 1975, then retired
from the space agency and the Air
Force and held executive posi-
tions in the aerospace industry.
Mr. Worden leaves his two
daughters, both from his first
marriage, to Pamela Ellen Vander
Beek, which ended in divorce; a
stepdaughter from his marriage
to Jill Lee Hotchkiss, who died in
2014; two brothers, two sisters
and five grandchildren.NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICEALFREDWORDEN
ASTRONAUT,88Apollo15crewmemberorbitedthemoon,captureditsterrainonfilm
RICHARDGOLDSTEIN
AlfredWordenwasoneofthreeastronautsonApollo15,thefirstNASA
moonmissiondevotedmainlytoscience.NASA/THENEWYORKTIMES