Throughout the pages of his legendary series, the Gaulish warrior Asterix has sprinted across the globe, through Hispania, Egypt, Switzerland, and 50 BC Britain. In 2026, however, the ultimate treasure chased him right into an auction room, commanding a staggering $1.70 million. The original cover illustration for the comic book Asterix in Britain, one of the highest grossers of the best-selling European comic book series in history, was auctioned in Belgium for almost €1.5 million by auction house BD Enchères in Liège. The highly underestimated cover (€150,000 to €200,000) went on to set a world record for a work by the artist Albert Uderzo, noted Spiegel. Uderzo and René Goscinny were the dynamic duo that created Asterix and Obelix, characters who have sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 110 languages.
What the mystery buyer took home from BD Enchères’ 81st cataloged comic-art auction is a 34 x 47 cm gouache-style painted cover boasting bright, opaque, pigmented hues. The cover, which sold for eight times the estimate, looks striking with the saturated red, yellow, blue, and green palette associated with classic Asterix albums. It is action-packed, showing Asterix, Obelix, and Teefax fleeing with a barrel, pursued by rugby players. Beyond that chaos comes a personal touch, a handwritten dedication from René Goscinny and Uderzo to their publisher, Georges Dargaud, in which they write that he was first and foremost their friend before he was their publisher. “To Georges Dargaud, who is our friend before being our publisher. His authors, who are first and foremost his friends,” the inscription reads.
Decades later, the winner of this colorful cover truly won something coveted, as Uderzo’s original Asterix album period produced only a few dozen such master images. Many of those artistic treasures remain in family, institutional, or long-established private collections. Along with rarity, the secretive buyer also took home the pride of helping create a new world record for Uderzo, whose work e Tour de Gaule d’Astérix, previously fetched a then-record price of $1.6 million at an auction in Paris in the fall of 2017.
