Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) by Alan Grant and Jon Haward

This appeared somewhere else first. It's a bunch of short strips - many of them single-pagers, but with longer installments as it goes along. It was collected in this 2012 volume from the small Canadian company Renegade Arts Entertainment, but I'm pretty sure it ran in a comics magazine - I doubt 2000 AD, but probably something British - for a year or three or five previously.

The book doesn't say where or when that happened, assuming it did happen. Well, this digital edition I read doesn't have any previous publication information, but it also is missing at least a few pages in the middle (a multi-part epic about Hercules jumps from Part 1 to Part 3, with some disjoint pages in the middle that might be from Part 2), so it could be missing more pages than that.

So what I have is just the stories, and I'm not confident (see above) I have all of that. Let me assume there's just one clump of missing pages - probably only two or three - and go from there.

Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) is a jokey series about a fat little guy who has the physical appearance we expect from traditional representations of the Buddha, but his personality, especially as the book goes on, is much more of a good-time-loving, pot-smoking, relatively smart Scots layabout.

It was written by Alan Grant, drawn by Jon Haward, and (I think) colored by Jamie Grant - there's a page with author bios at the end, but no clear title page (maybe that's missing as well?) or copyright.

So Buddha - I feel like I should call him Siddhartha, since he's not Buddha because he's not enlightened yet, but the book calls him Buddha throughout - gets annoyed in his meditations under the tree, and decides to wander off  and do other things. He meets the Hare Krishnas, and doesn't like their vibe. He spends a few strips with Jesus, who he gets along well with, but that dude is eventually crucified, and Buddha has to move on. He has a few random one-offs, then dives into a longer series of stories with Hercules. After that, it gets very various: Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, the Mexican Day of the Dead, Shangri-La, Merlin, Elvis, Santa Claus, Prince Harry. (There's a few other things in between as well - the edition I read had fifty-eight pages of comics, and probably several pages missing- and the stories top out at maybe four pages.)

It's all random, with only a vague sense of a sequence. Buddha is in a different time period for almost every story without any clear mechanism, except for a weird time-travel bit to introduce the Elvis strip. The point is to have this slacker pseudo-Buddha character meet a whole bunch of religious, mythological, and historical characters.

He is not very much like any version of the Buddha any of us has ever seen before. He's very little like the traditional image of the pre-enlightenment Siddhartha, either - that guy was a young noble, deeply concerned with the plight of the poor, not a fat bald pleasure-seeker. But that's the joke, here - you buy into that, or you're not interested.

This is all amusing, but it's a lot of essentially the same joke over and over again. If Grant had Buddha meet some ascetics, or maybe Greek philosophers in general, there might have been some tension with Buddha hedonistic world-view, but that's not the vibe he was apparently going for - this is goofy, pleasant humor, stoner-adjacent, with a strong British flavor.