Ed the Happy Clown

Did You Know?

• Brown grew up in Châteauguay, Quebec, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority.
• The story spans Brown's interests from political skepticism to scatological humour to vampires and werewolves.
• Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to adapt Ed to film, using the title Yummy Fur, but the project has struggled to find financial backing.

Content

Ed's life is a series of increasingly grim and bizarre misfortunes. His most surreal ordeal involves the tip of his penis being replaced by the head of a tiny, talking Ronald Reagan from an alternate universe. Along the way, he crosses paths with penis-worshipping pygmies, flesh-eating rats, Martians, and Frankenstein's monster. The narrative blends black comedy with Christian symbolism. Through it all, Ed remains a gentle, childlike innocent with an unshakable optimism, even after being imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit and falling for a vampire.

The children's hospital Ed was about to visit burns down, killing everyone inside. He ends up in jail after finding the severed hand of hospital janitor Chet Doodley, which the police assume he stole. While incarcerated, a fellow inmate suffers from unstoppable diarrhea, and the feces fill the prison, engulfing Ed. When he emerges, his penis tip has been replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from Dimension X, a world of tiny people. Dimension X had been dumping its waste through a trans-dimensional portal, which turns out to be the anus of the man who couldn't stop defecating. Reagan's body remains in Dimension X, and the professor who discovered the portal comes to Ed's dimension looking for the head.

Chet believes losing his hand is divine punishment for his unfaithfulness, recalling a childhood story about Saint Justin, who cut off his own hand to avoid sin. To atone, Chet kills his girlfriend, Josie, in the woods. Penis-worshipping, rat-eating pygmy cannibals drag both Josie and Ed into the sewers. As they prepare to sever Ed's penis, Josie reanimates and saves him. They try to escape but are accidentally shot by a mother-daughter pair of pygmy hunters. Josie dies again, and her disembodied spirit learns from the ghost of Chet's sister that she has become a vampire.

Style

Comics historian John Bell noted that Brown seemed to have arrived in print as a nearly complete artist. His work shows traces of Robert Crumb, Harold Gray, and Jack Kirby, yet it stands apart from theirs. Over the course of Ed, Brown kept growing as an artist and draftsman, showing clear improvement from the graphic novel’s start to its end. Brown works differently from most cartoonists: he does not lay out whole pages at once.

Instead, he draws each panel on its own sheet of paper and later puts them together. For Ed, he used 5 x 5 inch squares of cheap typewriter paper, resting them on a block of wood on his lap instead of a drawing board. His tools included Rapidograph technical pens, markers, crowquill pens, and ink brushes. He sometimes made photocopies from his pencil drawings, which he found faster and gave a more spontaneous feel.

He worked without rulers or pre-drawn lettering. He would first sketch lightly in blue pencil, then go over it with an HB pencil, saying that most of the work was done at that stage. For the pre-Vortex stories, he inked with a brush. When he took on a regular schedule, he switched to cheap markers or pencils to speed up, but kept using a brush for black areas and dialogue balloons.

Toward the end, he liked the brush again but found it too slow to use as much as he wanted. Photocopying before sending work to the printer let him make sure the blacks were dark enough. He sometimes scripted pages or scenes, but more often he didn’t, writing dialogue only after drawing the artwork. He didn’t plan stories in advance, though he might have a few ideas ready.

Some ideas carried him through two or three issues of Yummy Fur. He used flashbacks and different viewpoints to adjust the story as needed. For example, when he revisited the scene of Josie’s murder, he added Ed behind a bush, connecting their fates—even though he originally didn’t know Ed was there.

Publication

Ed the Happy Clown first appeared in July 1983, in the second issue of Chester Brown's original Yummy Fur minicomic. Those seven minicomic issues were later reprinted across the first three issues of the full-sized Yummy Fur series published by Vortex Comics in 1986 and 1987. The character ran in the first eighteen issues of that series, sharing space with other features, most notably Brown's adaptations of the Gospels. Brown originally planned Ed as an ongoing character similar to those from Marvel or DC, but by the late 1980s he found the character limiting.

Inspired by the autobiographical work of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt, and the simple cartooning of fellow Toronto artist Seth, Brown shifted to personal stories. From issue 4 onward, the comic juxtaposed Ed's adventures with straightforward adaptations of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. In 2004, Brown began a revised version of Ed but abandoned it, feeling it was no improvement. Drawn & Quarterly, Brown's publisher since 1991, reissued the Definitive Ed collection as a nine-issue series from 2005 to 2006, titled Ed the Happy Clown, with new covers, previously unpublished art, and extensive commentary.

That series drew mainly from Yummy Fur issues two through twelve, plus some material from issue seventeen. Roughly 80 pages—a third of the original Ed stories—remain uncollected, including the entire 24-page conclusion from issue eighteen. The first collection, Ed the Happy Clown: A Yummy Fur Book, came from Vortex in 1989 and included a cartoon foreword by Harvey Pekar. It won a Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album and a UK Comic Art Award in 1990.

A second Vortex edition appeared in 1992, marketed as The Definitive Ed Book, which reprinted the first edition with an altered ending and some material from Yummy Fur 17, but left out most content after Chet's death.

Reception and legacy

Critics widely regard Ed the Happy Clown as a defining work of the 1980s alternative comics scene, with its surreal influence appearing later in books like Daniel Clowes’s Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and Charles Burns’s Black Hole. It earned acclaim from The Comics Journal, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone, which included it on an early-1990s Hot list. Time ranked it seventh on its all-time top ten graphic novels list. Kim Thompson placed it 27th on his top 100 comics of the 20th century, and Tom Spurgeon called it one of the three best alt-comix serials ever.

The book also made Gene Kannenberg’s 500 Essential Graphic Novels in 2008. Ed strongly influenced Brown’s peers, including Dave Sim and Seth, who admired the ambitious storytelling, especially sequences that revisited scenes from new angles, like Josie’s death. Dave Cooper called it the most perfect book ever. Other artists citing its influence include Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, Matt Madden, Eric Reynolds, Alex Fellows (whose Canvas shows its mark), and Bryan Lee O’Malley, who called Brown a golden god and said Lost at Sea was heavily shaped by Ed.

Anders Nilsen ranked it among his top five comics and a major influence on his Big Questions. Critic Chris Lanier grouped Ed with Clowes’s, Max Andersson’s Pixy, and Eric Drooker’s Flood!, tracing their roots to German Dada and the Theatre of the Absurd, noting their frequent but symbolically empty symbols. Reviewer Brad McKay found Ed both hopeless and funny, a balance he said filmmakers like Tim Burton and Todd Solondz rarely achieve. D. Aviva Rothschild compared the experience to staring at six-day-old roadkill. Brown’s own father was so offended he stopped reading after the fifth minicomic, Ed and the Beanstalk.