The aim of the thesis is to confront predominantly Celtic nations depicted in the comic series about Aste rix by René Goscinny and Albert Uderz with information derived from literary as well as archaeological sources and consequently to describe current stereotypes and political and social events appearing in the series. Since its origin, Asterix series has become a world phenomenon with readers across both the social and age spectrum. Numerous allusions to the recent past, which the authors decided to humorously comment on through their cartoon characters, can be found in the series. However, each of the stories takes place in the historical background of the times around the year 50 BC, and it seems interesting to observe to what extent Uderzo and Goscinny stick to the sources and when their fantasy takes over. Keywords: Asterix, René Goscinny, Albert Uderzo, phenomenon, Celtic nations, ancient times, the Gauls, the Belgae, the Picts, the present nations, international

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the textual composition of René Goscinny’s Astérix and Le petit Nicolas, demonstrating how they differ and why. Taking a statistical look at the comparative qualities of each series of works, the structural differences and similarities in language use in these two series and their respective media are highlighted and compared. Though one might expect more complicated language use in traditional text by virtue of its format, analysis of average word length, average sentence length, lexical diversity, the prevalence of specific forms (the passé composé, possessive pronouns, etc.), and preferred collocations (ils sont fous, ces romains !) shows interesting results. Though Le petit Nicolas has longer sentences and more relative pronouns (and hence more clauses per sentence on average), Astérix has longer words and more lexical diversity. A similar comparison of the albums of Astérix written by Goscinny to those of Uderzo, paying additional attention to the structural elements of each album (usage of narration and sound effects, for example) shows that Goscinny's love of reusing phrases is far greater than Uderzo's, and that the two have very different ideas of timing as expressed in narration boxes.