There's really only one side you can take in all this: that of the plucky Gallic resisters against the invaders. The story so far: it is 2009 AD. Albert Uderzo, illustrator and, since 1977, only begetter of the Asterix series of books, has retired and sold his rights to Hachette Livre. Which means, en effet, that the company can continue to bring out new Asterix stories untouched by his hand. But his daughter, Sylvie, has now railed against his decision in Le Monde, accusing him of selling out to "those who would negate all the values he taught me: independence, fraternity, conviviality and resistance". (Any clumsiness or inaccuracies in this translation are my fault. "Fraternité" is a much more loaded word in French than "fraternity" is in English.) She points out the decision taken in comparable circumstances by Hergé, creator of Tintin, that there be no additions to the canon after his death.

As I have said on numerous occasions, the quality of the Asterix stories plunged after the death of Uderzo's partner, Rene Goscinny, who wrote them; and this latest development we could have foreseen, for one of the recurring motifs of Goscinny's narratives was an abiding distrust of rampant capitalism, expressed in the most penetrating satire available to the medium of the bande dessinée.

"These barbarians aren't interested in money," says a frustrated Julius Caesar in Asterix and the Roman Agent, as he hears a plan to undermine the Gaulish resistance by buying them off. "If they were, the magic potion would have been on the market long ago." But even by then Asterix was big business; now it's even bigger.

Six years later, in Obelix and Co, Goscinny is less sanguine about the villagers' native common sense: the economics whizz-kid Caius Preposterus from the LSE (Latin School of Economics) hatches a plan to demoralise the villagers by introducing rampant consumerism. He nearly succeeds, but in the end his plan backfires, and he starts what these days could only be called a catastrophic credit crunch, nearly emptying the Imperial coffers by stimulating a faddish demand for menhirs ("It's the right one, it's not the light one ... It's a menhir!" goes the jingle during an ad break at the Circus Maximus). It should, obviously, be required reading for every student of economics, and had its lessons been taken on board, we might not be in the mess we're in now. There's a hilarious sequence that shows Caesar, for the first time, completely baffled as he listens to Preposterus's marketing bollocks:

"The following passage will be difficult for those of you unacquainted with the ancient business world to understand, especially as, these days, such a state of affairs could never exist since no one would dream of trying to sell something utterly useless ..."

Well, Hachette Livre, as people love to point out, is part of an enormous conglomerate which manufactures, among other things, missiles; I once speculated that the Asterix series represented not only a wish-fulfilment fantasy about resistance during the second world war, but also subconsciously nodded to France's desire for an independent force de frappe - that is, a menhir-shaped object flying through the air causing maximum devastation to her enemies. Except in this case it is the French who are now the baddies, occupying themselves, as it were.

How Sylvie is going to allow her father's creation to rest in peace I really don't know. For in real life there is, unfortunately, no such thing as a magic potion that can thwart the aims of big business.