Leonardo the Genius (Vol. 1) by Bob De Groot & Turk

The credit on the book just says "De Groot and Turk," but other official descriptions include De Groot's first name. I'd have to go to a secondary source to learn that Turk is actually an artist named Philippe Liégeois. Similarly, this material looks to be forty or fifty years old, but the book itself gives a 2002 publication date in French and a 2016 date for this translation by Montana Kane.

The same secondary source notes that the Léonard comics - the terminal "o" pops up in Dutch and English translations, and possibly elsewhere, but the original French and Belgian editions don't have it - began in 1974. I think this book collects '70s stories in a package - possibly the start of an entire repackaged series - from the early days of this century.

This is one of those works of humor that seem to be very popular in their home culture - there have been fifty-seven volumes in French, continuing to the present day - but have not travelled as well. At least, it's barely traveled into English, which is the only bit I can really evaluate.

The premise is simple: there's this genius, living in a small town in a vaguely Renaissance world (but with some Renaissance-versions of modern things when the jokes require them), who invents crazy things. He looks a lot like Leonardo Da Vinci. This is the first book of his adventures: Leonardo the Genius.

It starts out with single-pagers, and even the longer stories only last four or five pages. I see that this series originated in magazines, and might still appear in magazines today, which explains that.

The jokes are silly and broad, which makes me wonder why it hasn't traveled into English more successfully. There is something vaguely European about it: like Asterix, there's an underlying sense that you have to have at least a little bit of cultural/historical grounding to get the jokes, and maybe general American audiences react badly to that.

Over the course of this book, Leonard hires an assistant - just called "Disciple" here, though I gather he gets a name in some later stories. This allows even more slapstick, and for the inevitable "guy wrapped up in bandages in a hospital bed" results of some less-successful experiments.

As I said, it's all just a bit old-fashioned - big squared panels with tightly ruled lines, squared-off dialogue balloons, that mid-century style of humor, a big-nose cartooning style from Turk - but that's just a sign of the era it came from. A few of the jokes are unfortunate now - there's one in which Leonardo invents the first airplane, and then a swarthy guy tries to hijack it to Cuba, ha ha ha - but most of it is durable all-ages humor that still basically works.

I find this kind of series fascinating, because it's so obviously A Big Deal in the land of its birth, probably hyped every year when a new volume comes out and the big birthday/Christmas wish for thousands of kids, and yet it's totally unknown in my country. The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting. The book itself...ehhh, it was OK. I think it's a lot more resonant if you grew up with it.