A Paris birth and a rabbi’s grandson
René Goscinny was born in Paris on August 14, 1926, the younger son of Jewish immigrants. His father, Stanisław Simkha Gościnny, was a chemical engineer from Warsaw and, according to the comics historian Lambiek, the third son of a rabbi, Abraham Goscinny; he had moved to Paris with his brother in 1906. His mother, Anna Bereśniak, came from Chodorków, a village near Kiev in today’s Ukraine, and her father, Abraham Lazare Berezniak, had founded a printing company. The couple met in Paris and married in 1919; their elder son, Claude, was born in 1920.
When René was two the family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father had been hired as a chemical engineer, reportedly by the Jewish Colonization Association. The household was not especially religious, as the very French names of the two boys suggest. René had a happy childhood, went to French-language schools, spent summer holidays in Uruguay, and was often the class clown, perhaps to hide a natural shyness. He drew constantly, inspired by the illustrated stories he loved.
Escaping the war, losing a father
Living in Argentina, the Goscinnys escaped the Holocaust that engulfed Europe. After the war they learned that several relatives had died in Nazi concentration camps. In December 1943, just after René finished school, his father died of a stroke, and the seventeen-year-old had to go to work, first as an assistant accountant in a tyre factory and then as a junior illustrator in an advertising agency.
In 1945 he and his widowed mother emigrated to New York to join her brother Boris, one of her last surviving brothers. To avoid being drafted into the American army, René went to France in 1946 to do his military service in the French army, where he served with an Alpine infantry battalion at Aubagne and became the regiment’s official artist, drawing illustrations and posters.
Hard years in New York
Back in New York in 1947, Goscinny went through the most difficult period of his life: jobless, alone and poor. By 1948 he had found work in a small studio, where he became friends with Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder and Jack Davis, who would soon create the satirical magazine Mad. Their irreverent humour left a deep mark on him. He became art director at a small publisher, Kunen, and wrote four books for children.
In New York he also met two Belgian cartoonists, Joseph Gillain, known as Jijé, and Maurice de Bevere, known as Morris, the creator of the cowboy Lucky Luke. Through them he was recruited by Georges Troisfontaines of the World Press agency, who brought him back to Europe in 1951 to head its Paris office. There Goscinny met a young illustrator named Albert Uderzo, and one of the great partnerships in comics began.
Fighting for the people who write comics
In the early 1950s, writing comics was not regarded as a real profession. Editors and publishers dealt only with artists, writers were often anonymous, and authors working through agencies such as World Press received only wages while the agency kept the rights to their work. In 1956 Goscinny and the writer Jean-Michel Charlier tried to rally the agency’s artists behind a creators’ charter demanding better pay, rights to their work and recognition of their professional expertise.
Troisfontaines saw it as an attempt at unionisation and fired Goscinny. Out of solidarity, Charlier and Uderzo left the agency too, and so did the cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé. Goscinny never stopped arguing that writers deserved the same credit as artists. His own name began appearing on Lucky Luke only in 1961, six years after he started writing it, but by the end of his career he was one of the few comic writers as famous as the artists he worked with, and the battle he had begun helped establish the scriptwriter as a recognised author.
Lucky Luke and Le Petit Nicolas
From 1955 Goscinny wrote the adventures of Lucky Luke, “the man who shoots faster than his shadow,” for Morris. He turned the series into a brilliant parody of the Wild West, adding characters such as the four bungling Dalton brothers and Rantanplan, the dimmest dog in the West. Their collaboration lasted until shortly before Goscinny’s death and produced dozens of albums, a period regarded as the series’ golden age.
With Sempé he created Le Petit Nicolas. After a short comic strip version in 1955, the stories reappeared in 1959 as short illustrated texts told in the voice of a small Parisian schoolboy, naïve, funny and tender. Collected in books from 1960, they became classics of children’s literature in France, won the Prix Alphonse-Allais for humorous writing in 1964, and have been translated into many languages, from Russian and Japanese to Chinese and Hebrew.
Asterix and the village that never surrendered
In October 1959 Goscinny, Uderzo, Charlier and their partners launched a new comics magazine, Pilote. In its first issue Goscinny and Uderzo introduced Asterix the Gaul, a small, clever warrior whose village in Brittany holds out against the might of Julius Caesar thanks to a magic potion brewed by the village druid. The series was an instant hit and remains popular worldwide. Goscinny filled the stories with puns, running gags, affectionate national caricatures and references that delighted adults as much as children, and he worked with translators to help them find equivalents for his jokes.
As editor of Pilote, which he led for more than a decade from the early 1960s, he also launched and encouraged a new generation of French comic artists, and with Jean Tabary he created the scheming grand vizier Iznogoud. Asterix grew into one of the best-selling comic series in the world, translated, according to Lambiek, into more than 115 languages and dialects, from Arabic and Hindi to Latin and Ancient Greek. Schools have used the albums to help students learn French, and editions in Latin and Greek to teach the classics. By 2017 UNESCO’s Index Translationum listed Goscinny as the 20th most translated author in the world, with some 2,200 translations.
Films, family and an early death
Goscinny wrote for cinema and television too. After the first, disappointing film adaptation of Asterix, he and Uderzo took control of the next ones, and in 1974 they founded their own animation studio, Studios Idéfix, with Morris and the publisher Georges Dargaud. Its first feature, The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976), with its famous satire of bureaucracy in which the heroes must obtain “permit A38,” became a family classic in Europe.
He wrote original screenplays as well, including the Lucky Luke cartoon feature Daisy Town (1971) and The Ballad of the Daltons, which was released after his death, and live-action comedies such as Le Viager (1971) with the director Pierre Tchernia. His last years were not easy. After the revolt of Pilote’s younger artists in May 1968 he found himself in repeated conflicts, eventually left the magazine he had helped to found, and in the late 1970s was in dispute over rights and payment for Lucky Luke while he and Uderzo prepared to leave their publisher.
In 1967 Goscinny married Gilberte Pollaro-Millo, and in 1968 their daughter, Anne, was born; she became a writer and later helped bring her father’s unpublished Petit Nicolas stories to readers. On November 5, 1977, Goscinny died of a heart attack at the age of 51, during a routine cardiac stress test at his doctor’s office in Paris. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Nice. When Uderzo finished drawing Asterix in Belgium, the album Goscinny had been writing, he darkened the skies and drew rain on the page where his friend had died.
Jewish roots and remembrance
Goscinny was the son of Jewish immigrants and the grandson of a rabbi, raised in a secular household that moved between continents and languages. The comics historians at Lambiek point out that his own experience as an immigrant in Argentina, the United States and France lies behind the good-humoured comedy of nationalities in his stories, in which foreign characters are never mere targets. Uderzo paid tribute to him by giving his likeness to a Jewish character, Saul ben Ephishul, in Asterix and the Black Gold (1981), an album dedicated to Goscinny’s memory.
In 2017, to mark forty years since his death, the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris (mahJ) devoted a major retrospective to him, René Goscinny, au-delà du rire (“beyond laughter”), with more than 200 pieces including original scripts and storyboards.
Legacy
Goscinny received the Swedish Adamson Award in 1974 and was inducted posthumously into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2005. The Angoulême International Comics Festival gives an annual René Goscinny Prize to encourage young comic writers, schools in France and Poland bear his name, and in January 2020 a bronze statue of him was unveiled near his former home in Paris, the first public statue in the city dedicated to a comics author.
René Goscinny gave the world characters who have made generations of children and adults laugh in well over a hundred languages, and he did it with a humour that teaches as it entertains, about history, about neighbouring peoples and about the absurdities of power. He also helped turn the people who write comics from anonymous hired hands into recognised authors. Every child who learns to read with Asterix or Le Petit Nicolas, and every comic writer who sees their name on the cover, owes him something.
Sources & further reading
René Goscinny, Lambiek Comiclopedia · René Goscinny, au-delà du rire, Time Out Paris · René Goscinny, Jewish Virtual Library · René Goscinny, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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