This has one of the best ideas of the whole series - Cacophonix is kidnapped by Romans as a gift to Caesar, so Asterix and Obelix follow him to Rome - when the bard is to be fed to the lions, our hero become gladiators. The gladiator/Roman setting inspire the drawings to an even higher level of artistry and by now the writers had the chief feature of the comic down to exact precision - to wit, showing people getting increasingly stressed. But I found this one annoying - the magic potion feels like even more of a cheat than normal (I mean, gladiators train really hard and here some these people with their anabolic sterois who are basically cheating). When they are in Rome surely we should feel they are in more danger? (It's like Superman where his all-conquering powers got boring after a while). It is funny that Asterix encourages the Gladiators to play dud games but you feel they could have gotten more out of the basic situation; ditto the concept of Cacofonix in Rome - the idea of this pretentious idiot on the loose in the capital of the Empire is a rich one, but instead we just get the one note samba of "isn't-he-a-bad singer).
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