Asterix #2

History

The source material reprinted here — 'Astérix et Cléopâtre' — was originally serialised in the French comics magazine Pilote beginning in 1964 and collected as an album by Dargaud in 1965, written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo. Egmont's Scandinavian branches (including Egmont Ehapa in Germany and Hjemmet/Egmont in Norway and Denmark) had been publishing translated Asterix editions since 1968, building a decades-long reprint infrastructure across Northern Europe. The specific 1998 Egmont edition under discussion is a late-1990s reprinting within that long-running regional publishing programme, produced as either a standard trade edition or as part of a collector-club subscription series (Seriesamlerklubben), depending on which of the two concurrent Egmont 1998 series this issue belongs to; the GCD records both as running simultaneously in overlapping Scandinavian markets.

Trivia · 8 facts

• The issue reprints 'Astérix et Cléopâtre' (Asterix and Cleopatra), the sixth album in the canonical Asterix series, originally scripted by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.
• The source album was first serialised in the Franco-Belgian magazine Pilote and collected by Dargaud in 1965.
• Grand Comics Database records identify two concurrent Egmont series with a 1998 issue #2 reprinting this same album: the Swedish-language Asterix (Egmont, 1996 series) #2 'Asterix och Kleopatra' (published 1998), and the Norwegian Asterix [Seriesamlerklubben] (Hjemmet/Egmont, 1998 series) #2 'Asterix og Kleopatra'.
• The album features the characters Numérobis (the Egyptian architect) and Amonbofis as key supporting cast — figures not original to this edition but central to the source story's plot.
• 1998 was the year a long legal trial concluded in France, with Dargaud losing its publishing and sales rights over the first 24 Goscinny-Uderzo albums — the very material these Egmont editions were built on, making the timing of this reprint historically resonant.
• Egmont (in its various national incarnations) has been the primary Northern European publisher of Asterix since the German-language Egmont Ehapa debut in 1968, making these Scandinavian reprint series part of one of the longest-running licensed comic relationships in European publishing.
• The Asterix series as a whole, of which this is a reprinted instalment, has been translated into over 110 languages and dialects, reflecting the cultural reach that made regional collector-club and standard editions commercially viable across multiple Egmont territories simultaneously.
• The [Seriesamlerklubben] (collector-club) series designation, if this is the Norwegian edition, indicates a subscription-based book-club format used by Hjemmet/Egmont throughout the late 1990s and 2000s to distribute classic Asterix albums to dedicated collectors in Norway.

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