The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel was a book published in France in 1565 with no text. It contains 120 woodcut illustrations with no artist mentioned. The "author" is Richard Breton, who only wrote a preface and did not create the illustrations. The artist is unknown to this day. YouTuber hochelaga refers to these illustrations as "demon doodles." The grotesque drawings remind us of what middle school students draw when they are bored in class. In this video, we learn some of the hypothetical inspirations for the fantasy creatures in the amusing illustrations. We'd never figure out on our own that at least some of these are akin to political cartoons, because we'd have to be medieval scholars to know what was going on at the time. The narrator doesn't know the meaning behind all of them, but the ones he tells us about are fascinating. -via Metafilter
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126311/page/n1/mode/2up
Rabelais wrote very coarse humor, which was popular at the time, and their adventures ran along the lines of identifying the perfect bum-wipe (today that would be toilet paper), with disgustingly detailed descriptions of all what they investigated by empirical means. Spoiler Alert: the winner was a well-downed goose pulled by the neck between the legs.
Rabelais died in 1553, so Breton evidently carried on the character with his own work.