Rene Goscinny was born in Paris in 1926. After growing up in Argentina, he came to America where he shared a studio with future Mad magazine co-founder Harvey Kurtzman and collaborators Will Elder and Jack Davis, an association that would mark him for life. In 1959, he founded the magazine Pilote which premiered what was to become the most successful comic series anywhere: Asterix. By the late sixties, Pilote turned to an older audience pioneering an absolute revolution in comics styles, narration and sophistication. Asterix was not the only greatly successful series Goscinny penned, others include western parody Lucky Luke and the Little Nicholas series illustrated by Sempé. Goscinny's genius was not only in writing but also in editing, launching many famous and enormously innovative comics authors within the creative cauldron that Pilote magazine had become under his leadership, helping to raise comic art into a full-fledged art form. He died suddenly and way too early of cardiac arrest in 1977 at the age of 51. Albert Uderzo was born in France 1927 to Italian Immigrants.

In 1959 Goscinny and Uderzo became editor and artistic director (respectively) of Pilote magazine. Their creation, Asterix became a runaway success. After Goscinny's death in 1977, 26 volumes of Asterix were complete, Uderzo continued to write and illustrate the Asterix books on his own, publishing 8 volumes. The cover credits still read "Goscinny and Uderzo." He retired from drawing in 2011 but still oversees Asterix and the current publications by Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad.