“The year is 50 BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely….One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders.” So begins almost every volume of the adventures of Asterix the Gaul, as translated from the French by Anthea Bell and David Hockridge.

I must have read that line hundreds of times when I was a kid. I’m certain it’s how I learned the word indomitable. My family’s library included several volumes from the classic French comic series created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo in 1959, now numbering 38 volumes. With Asterix and his friend Obelix, I traveled all over Roman-occupied Europe. My vocabulary expanded well beyond indomitable as I puzzled out the characters’ outlandish names. Incompetent Bard Cacofonix led me to cacophony, for instance, and irascible elder Geriatrix to, well, geriatrics. It took me possibly a decade to understand the joke underlying the name of druid Getafix, who brews the magic potion that gives the Gauls the superstrength to hold out against the Romans and make mayhem wherever they go.

Even as a kid, I noticed that illustrator Uderzo employed a very different style in depicting African characters than he did with his European ones. Sure, everybody was a bulbous-nosed caricature, but although I doubt that stereotype had entered my vocabulary when I first saw them, I knew these African characters with their long, apelike arms; big, bare feet; and enormously oversized, bright-red lips were being made fun of in a way that the White characters were not. I regret to say that this did not stop my enjoyment of the comics.

But it did make me hesitant, as an adult, to share them with my daughter. I would have loved to have watched her sounding out Fulliautomatix (the blacksmith) and Unhygienix (the fishmonger) and laughing when she got the jokes. But even though I rescued several volumes from my parents’ attic, I couldn’t get enthusiastic about creating another fan.

And I can’t get enthusiastic about publisher Papercutz’s new translations of the Asterix comics, done by Joe Johnson for the U.S. market. As a committed lover of the Bell and Hockridge translations I find the new introduction clunky: “It’s the year 50 BC. All of Gaul is occupied by the Romans….Well, not all of it. The village inhabited by resolute Gauls resists the invaders again and again.” It just doesn’t sing the same way to me. Most of the familiar names have been retained, but some seem to have been changed out of some schoolmarmish sense of what’s appropriate for young children. Getafix, for instance, is now Panoramix—interestingly, the character’s original, French name but one that’s not nearly so clever.

But what’s not changed is the shocking stereotyping of characters of color. In the newest volume, Asterix and the Chieftain’s Daughter, by author Jean-Yves Ferri, illustrator Didier Conrad, and colorist Thierry Mébarki, our heroes encounter some recurring characters: a ship of pirates with one Black crew member. His lips are now brown rather than bright red, but in every other respect, he is the hulking, gorillalike character of yore. What’s more, the depictions of two new (very minor) child characters of color seen in the book’s final panels are equally troubling: a Black child with enormous lips wearing a leopard skin and a ludicrously tiny Asian child with squinty-shut eyes. Does Papercutz not wonder how these books will land in 2020 America?

With a translation that’s likely to disappoint nostalgic readers and no meaningful attempt to address the series’ racism for new ones, this is one publishing event that’s hard to get excited about.

Vicky Smith is a young readers’ editor.