René Goscinny

René Goscinny (1926-1977) was a French comics writer and editor who created Asterix with the artist Albert Uderzo, scripted Lucky Luke for Morris and wrote Le Petit Nicolas with the illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé.

He was born in Paris on 14 August 1926 to Jewish immigrants from Poland, and the family moved to Buenos Aires when he was two, where he went to French-language schools. In 1945 he moved to New York with his mother, worked in a small art studio and met Harvey Kurtzman and other future MAD contributors. Returning to Europe in 1951, he joined Georges Troisfontaines' agency, where he met Uderzo; their early collaborations included Oumpah-Pah. He wrote Lucky Luke with Morris from 1955 until his death.

In 1959 he helped launch the magazine Pilote, and Asterix appeared in its first issue on 29 October 1959. He later edited the magazine, and while there also wrote Iznogoud with Jean Tabary (from 1962) and Les Dingodossiers with Gotlib. Le Petit Nicolas, a child's-eye view of school and family, began in 1956 in Le Moustique as a strip and was then written as short stories for Sud-Ouest and Pilote until 1965. Goscinny died in Paris on 5 November 1977, aged 51, of a heart attack during a medical stress test. He was posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2005.

For collectors. The first Asterix album, Astérix le Gaulois, was published by Dargaud in 1961 and sold 6,000 copies in its first year; by 2025 the series had sold some 393 million copies. The English translations by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge began in 1969, when Brockhampton Press published Asterix the Gaul. Before that, Asterix strips had run in British comics such as Valiant and Ranger under other names.