Design sketches by Albert Uderzo for ASTERIX. Uderzo originally wanted Asterix to be a tall, muscular, and shirtless warrior—it was actually René Goscinny, I believe, who pushed back, insisting that the hero should be small, puny, and rely on his wits rather than his muscles. This was a pretty subversive move for 1950s comics, which usually featured "mighty" heroes. You can see the transition in the bottom sketch of the first page, where he’s starting to shrink into the “clever little Gaul we know today” (cliché TV voice-over).
I’ve read somewhere that Uderzo was obsessed with noses. He believed that in caricature, the nose is the center of the soul. In these sketches, you can see him testing different nose-to-mustache ratios.
(I’ve posted Asterix design sketches before; there is some overlap here.)
