LeBlanc was actually born in Haiti in 1921, although his family moved to New York City while he was still a child. In 1939, LeBlanc got hired at the Eisner-Iger shop doing inking and background work. When that studio closed down, LeBlanc continued working on comics in shop-style environments, first directly for Jerry Iger's solo studio followed soon after by Jack Binder's. Shortly after moving to Cuba in 1944, he introduced Intellectual Amos, which ran as a back-up to Will Eisner's The Spirit Sunday newspaper section. The US customs wound up making sending his work from Cuba overly expensive, but he was able to get the stories into Quality Comics titles like National Comics where it ran until 1947.
LeBlanc started selling work to the Brazilian market (he left Cuba for Brazil after only a short stay) where most of his original work like Morena Flor was published. He did move back to New York in 1956, and began working with Eisner nad other comics houses again, but leaving his original creations behind to essentially ghost others' characters like The Spirit, Plastic Man, and Mandrake the Magician. He worked on adaptations of The Bible as well as some of Lee Ames' "How To Draw" books. He eventually passed away in 1998.
But that is, I think, largely why LeBlanc isn't well-known in the US. The vast majority of his work printed here was essentially uncredited, with the bulk of the fame going to the original creator(s). Most of his original work was published in Brazil; it's well-regarded enough that he was awarded the Southern Cross, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a Brazilian citizen for his illustrations of classical literature.
LeBlanc's Intellectual Amos stories are short and have minimal continuity. His sidekick Wilbur the Goblin is initially larger than Amos and has a comically pronounced lisp, but shrinks in size and eventually becomes mute with no explanation for either. Amos' own design features change from having something of a pear-shaped body and excessively full lips in his first outing, dropping down to more 'normal' child proportions after several months. His glasses are used at first, but eventually become a token accessory always resting above his brow. (Amusingly, though, LeBlanc continues to show Amos stopping to clean his glasses, only to place them back on top of his head when he's done.)
(I should point out too that the "Intellectual" part of his name does not suggest any real genius on Amos' part. It's explictly stated that he's not especially smart, but he does have a photographic memory and spent the earliest days of his youth growing up in a library. He's repeatedly shown to mentally consult books he's read, rather than utilizing any Holmes-ian deductive capabilities.)
Last month, Midcentury Comics collected all of the Intellecutal Amos stories from National Comics in a single volume. It doesn't include The Spirit backup stories and there's no additional context other than the stories themselves. The images do not have a lot by way of restoration, so they still show yellowed paper and some mis-registrations; however, the scans are still all very clean and it's emminently readable. It's not really an archival volume or anything, but it does collect most of the Intellectual Amos stories for the very first time.
The stories have a lot of imagination, and are depicted with a lot of energy. There were been more than a few times when Eisner's influence is quite evident, with incredibly limber characters and using the border panels themselves as design elements of the story. Some of the "mysteries" get solved in the last couple panels of each story as Amos reveals some critical piece of information the audience was not made privvy to, and those feel like they end a bit abruptly, but on the whole, the stories and art are whimsical and incredibly charming.
I've been itching for an Intellectual Amos collection since I first heard about the character and, while this volume have a lot of extra bells and whistles to it, it comes in relatively cheap at just over twenty bucks, so I will gladly take it! I did do some double-checking, too, before I ordered a copy and it does indeed appear that the work did pass into the public domain in the 1970s, so if you find a copy from somewhere else for even cheaper, go ahead and grab yourself a copy!
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