Le Génie des Alpages is a French-Belgian comic book series by Richard Peyzaret, who uses the idiosyncratic Pen Name F'murrr.
The series is a humoristic take on life in the alpages, the high-altitude grazing fields where sheep are traditionally sent to spend the summer in the French Alps. The main characters are Athanase the young shepherd, his unnamed pet dog, and the restless, squabbling sheep.
The humor is firmly of the absurd type, and partly inspired by Monty Python. Random developments such as the vegetation picking itself up by the roots and walking about, or a sentient fog playing accordion with the mountains, are to be expected. Beyond the absurdity, the tone of the series is gently anarchist, with authority figures being turned into ridicule.
Tropes:
- Acid Reflux Nightmare: Eating cheese fondue for dinner causes the dog to have a weird nightmare.
- Arcadia: Subverted at times, but generally played straight. The mountain grazing fields are depicted as clean and pristine (if completely wacky), and the few city slickers who come up from the valleys are mostly fools or intrusive busibodies.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: Mammoth-sized sheep are just another example of comic absurdity.
- Bungling Inventor: The dog has, among other things, invented miniature sentient automata and a process to mass-produce genies' lamps.
- Butt-Monkey: Romuald tries to be a credible leader for the sheep herd, but is often subjected to ridicule.
- Comically Missing the Point: One short story is about a woman coming to see the shepherd to asks him if she can get some milk from one of his female sheep. Romuald, who is a ram, politely proposes himself to be milked, to which the woman sarcastically answers "With horns like these, you sure must give good milk." Romuald then spends the rest of the story assuming that having horns means he produces bad quality milk, not realising that he's unable to produce milk at all since he's a male.
- Dreadful Musician: One of the sheep plays bagpipes so atrociously, it creates localized earthquakes.
- Eyes Out of Sight: The dog's shaggy hair always hides his eyes.
- Funny Background Event: A staple of the comic; a few are pretty much guaranted with ever story. Usually with the sheep's weird antics.
- Human Popsicle: The ovine equivalent. A primitive, mammoth-sized sheep is discovered frozen inside a glacier. The sheep melt the ice around him and successfully revive him.
- Iconic Sequel Character: While Athanase is one of the main characters and shares the protagonist role with the dog, he's introduced in the third book to replace the original shepherd.
- Intoxication Ensues: At one point, the old shepherd begins to hallucinate and has a conversation with his long-dead father. Turns out the dog had laced his pipe tobacco with weed.
- No Name Given: The dog and the shepherd from the early comics aren't given names. Lampshaded when the dog asks a sheep who fancies himself the ovine Einstein, "What is my name?", and since the latter didn't know, the whole universe disappeared. Until the next page, that is.
- The Smurfette Principle: Inverted (sort of) as Romuald is the only ram among countless female sheep.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The various characters usually use a very classy-sounding and complicated language... and then start spouting slang, if not swears.
- Pale Females, Dark Males: Almost every female sheep in the herd has white wool, while Romuald, one of the only males, has black wool.
- Put on a Bus: The older shepherd, a main character in the early books, pretty much drops out of the series later on.
- Shout-Out:
- To The Little Prince, by having the prince show up at one point asking for a stranded airplane pilot, logically, to draw him a sheep.
- To the Silver Surfer with the "Silver Skater".
- Talking Animal: The shepherd dog, the multiple sheep, and just about every other animal that shows up.
- Unlimited Wardrobe: Athanase has a seemingly infinite collection of wool sweaters, which he wears one on top of another.
