Iznogoud

When I was a kid, I had a comic which had a few stories in it that constantly featured a Grand Vizier trying to dispose a Caliph. One constant line of dialogue was “I want to be the Caliph instead of the Caliph”. I’m not sure it was a translation problem, but I never understood that as a kid. (Whereas I did finally click on it being “I want to the new Caliph instead of the person who is currently in that role.”)

I finally got around to seeking out what this was recently, and found out about Iznogoud, and, of course, had to grab and read them all. There are nine compilation books (I think the one I had was book 9), and… it seems there was an animated series and even a movie. Huh.

What shows up immediately is the terrible tendency for puns. Far worse than Asterix. We start with Iznogoud himself, and lots of the others do have pun names more in French, and pleny of people have just some Arabic’d version of real world people or job (which I’m looking at the translater more for this).

Definitely fun, but don’t overdulge if you have low tolerance for puns.

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