Ed the Happy Clown
Encyclopedia
Ed the Happy Clown is the title character of an award-winning and influential comic book
story by the Canadian cartoonist
, Chester Brown
. It is dark and surreal, and largely improvised, having started from a series of unrelated short comic stories that Brown soon went on to tie together. Ed is a large-headed, child-like children's clown
, who is subjected to one horrifying affliction after another.
The story is a dark, humorous mix of genres which includes vampire
s, pygmy
cannibals, Martian
s, Frankenstein's monster
, and others. Prominent is its use of scatalogical humour, nudity, sex, body horror
and extreme graphic violence
. Central to the plot are a man who cannot stop defecating
, and the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
attached to the head
of the protagonist's penis
. There is much religious imagery throughout the story, including the story of a fictional "Saint Justin" whose right hand was severed by his wife who had caught him masturbating—a story which had a considerable influence on the actions of one of the main characters.
Originally serialized in Brown's comic book Yummy Fur, it was eventually collected in two different, incomplete editions by the defunct Vortex Comics
; later, the contents of the second edition were re-serialized as a nine-issue Ed the Happy Clown series from Drawn and Quarterly
, and will be collected again by them in mid-2012.
The story has won a number of awards, including a Harvey
, and in 2005, Time
placed it at #7 on its list
of the 10 best English-language graphic novel
s ever. Canadian film director Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to make an Ed movie, but the project has struggled to get financial backing.
, The Age of Surrealism by Wallace Fowley. "Embracing surrealistic spontaneous creation", Brown started work on a completely improvised comic which he called Yummy Fur, in which Ed was originally serialized. The story spanned a range of Brown's interests, from political skepticism to scatalogical humour to Brown's childhood interest in vampires and werewolves. The story was dark and surreal, but "both hopeless and funny, a trick moviemakers like Tim Burton
and Todd Solondz
wish they could pull off more regularly."
Ed suffers one indignity after another as the plot gets grimmer and more surreal. His bizarre misfortunes include being chased by cannibalistic pygmies
and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature, talking Ronald Reagan
from another universe
. Ed's adventures featured encounters with flesh-eating rats
, Martians, the Frankenstein monster and other characters out of traditional genre fiction
, but presented with Brown's own twisted, blackly funny sensibility and topped with some dark Christian symbolism
. Despite his ordeals—being imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, falling in love with a vampire
—Ed remained a gentle, childlike innocent, with a Candide
-like optimism.
The story has had more than one ending, and may have more in the future, with none of the endings being definitive.
Ed begins with the children's hospital he was on his way to visit burning down with all the children in it. A number of short gag strips occur one after the other, having no apparent relation to each other. After 30 pages or so, Brown attempts to tie the mess together into one grand plot.
Ed is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit—he had found the hospital janitor
Chet Doodley's hand and turned it in to the police, and the police assume he had taken it. While in prison, an unnamed character finds himself unable to stop defecating
. His faeces
fill up the jail, engulfing Ed. When he emerges, he finds the head of his penis has been replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
from Dimension X, a place much like Ed's but in which the people are considerably smaller. The dimension had a waste problem, which they tried to solve by dumping it into a hole to another dimension. The hole turned out to be the anus
of the man who couldn't stop defecating. Reagan's body was left in Dimension X, and the professor, who was the discoverer of the inter-dimensional portal, travels to Ed's dimension to find the head, eventually making contact with the authorities of Ed's world.
Chet Doodley attempts to atone for his unfaithfulness to his wife after inexplicably losing his hand by killing his girlfriend, Josie, in the woods. His hand returns to normal, and he prays
to God
in thanks. He leaves her body while he cleanses the blood off of himself in the river, but when he finishes, the body is gone.
After being beaten up, Ed is dragged into the sewers by penis-worshipping, rat-eating pygmy
cannibals, along with the body of Josie, who revives as a vampire
in time to save Ed from having his penis lopped off. The two attempt to escape from the sewers when they are accidentally shot by pygmy hunters. Josie dies again, and her disembodied spirit learns from the ghost of Chet's sister, Annie, that she has become a vampire.
The professor from Dimesion X, assisted by members of the staff of the popular Adventures in Science TV show, find Ed and the president in the sewers and bring him to their TV studio. The discovery is big news, and the professor and the president make a TV appearance, but when it is discovered that the people of Dimension X are homosexual, the professor is violently killed, and Ed and the body of the body of Josie are put in confinement. The studio is invaded by the pygmies, however, when they recognize their "Penis God" on the television.
Josie's spirit returns to her body, and she and Ed escape and make their way to the hospital where Chet works. Josie gets her revenge by seducing Chet and killing him before he is able to repent
, thus sending him to Hell
. In the alternate ending from the 1992 version of the book, much of the latter part of the story is dropped after Chet dies, and Chet and Josie end up in Hell together.
Ed is one of a number of men secretly kidnapped
in order for a man, Bick Backman, to have his penis transplanted
with a larger one, in order to please his wife. Out of the lineup of unconscious men, Ed's penis with the President's head on it stands out and is chosen for Backman. After the operation, the authorities raid the hospital and, finding Reagan, take Backman and leave Ed, who has had another penis sewed on in the President's place. The hospital hands Ed over to Mrs Backman, claiming he is her husband.
Mrs Backman takes her "husband" home, but her children are not convinced that he is their father, However, after he has spent some time in the house, they decide "he's way better than the other one". There is a striking resemblance between Ed and Mrs Backman's large, round heads, and eventually it is revealed by her mother that they were twin
s separated at birth
.
While at church, the Backman children are kidnapped by stone aliens, but the children are saved by Frankenstein's monster
, who lands them in Washington, D.C.
, where they find their kidnapped father. Josie and Ed's friend Christian rescue the Backmans, returning them to their home. After Ed has his clown makeup restored, he reverts to his cheerful self. When he goes to visit Josie, he learns that her apartment building has burned down, and she was the only casualty. He charred skeleton is brought out, clutching an unburnt hand.
with a Candide
-like optimism, despite the hardships his creator puts him through He's not an active protagonist
; rather, "things happen to him". He spends much of the story with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
from another dimension for a penishead
. He later discovers, after having the president severed from his penis and having a new one attached, that he has a long-lost twin sister.
Brown considers Ed to be an "adult who's pre-adolescent", whose sexuality is not fully formed.
Chet Doodley:A janitor
working at a hospital, he is plagued with guilt over cheating on his wife after his hand falls off for no apparent reason. After having a dream in which a statue of the Virgin Mary turns into his girlfriend, Josie, and has sex with him, he murders Josie while having sex with her by stabbing her in the back in the woods. Josie, who becomes a vampire afterwards, hunts him down and eventually breaks his neck, sending him to Hell
.
The character appears in some ways to be a stand-in for Brown himself ("Chet" is short for "Chester"). Brown admits that losing his hand like Chet is one of his phobias, as he wouldn't be able to draw any longer, and so named the character "Chet".
Josie:Chet's beautiful former girlfriend, who becomes a vampire "for actively engaging in a grievous sin" for committing adultery
with her boyfriend Chet, when he murders her by stabbing her in the back. Her vampire self ends up saving Ed from having his penis decapitated by pygmy
cannibals, and eventually tracks down Chet and kills him, sending him to Hell. In an alternate ending, she finds herself in Hell as well, eternally embracing Chet while being consumed by fire.
Ronald Reagan
:President from an alternate dimension, whose head ends up attached to the end of Ed's penis (a theme that has appeared in a number of other comics, such as The Talking Head (1990) by Paolo Baciliero and Pete Sickman-Garner's Young Tim). In Dimesion X, where he comes from, people are much smaller than in Ed's work, and are homosexual. In Ed's world, homosexuality is illegal.
Originally Brown had intended to use Ed Broadbent
, a left-wing
politician and then-leader of the Canadian
social democratic
New Democratic Party
, as the head of the penis, but changed it to the right-winger
Reagan due to how obscure Broadbent would have been to his American readers—Broadbent would "just[...]be a name to them". He later regretted the decision, saying he could have included an explanation in the back of the book as to who Broadbent was. Neither Broadbent nor Reagan were meant to have been political statements. Brown was not very politically aware at the time, and had only the vaguest notions of what right- and left-wing politics were, although he says he probably would have believed in the NDP's policies at the time had he been more aware of what they were. Years later, Brown became a libertarian
, and while "Reagan was no libertarian", he came to believe that Reagan was the best president of the U.S. since Calvin Coolidge
.
Professor Ferron Jones:Professor from Dimension X who discovers the inter-dimensional hole, and secretly makes his way to Ed's dimension to find the missing head of President Reagan when Nancy, the First Lady refuses to approve an expedition. He makes an appearance on TV, but later is killed when it is discovered that the people of his world are homosexual, as homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Ed's world.
Annie Doodley:Chet's dead sister, who guides Josie's disembodied spirit.
Becky Backman:Wife of Bick Beckman, whose penis transplant is interrupted by government agents. Ed is switched for Bick, and handed over to his wife. Ed starts a new life as Becky's husband, but it is later revealed to Becky by her mother that Ed is really her long lost twin brother, from whom she was separated at birth
.
Becky's role is minimized in the collections, as all scenes in which she appears after Ed is handed over to her at the hospital are dropped.
, graphic violence
, racist imagery, blasphemy
, profanity
and more. Brown himself had grown up in a strictly Baptist
household in which he was not allowed to swear. Some of the shocking content came from Brown confronting himself with things such as his disgust at scatalogical humour he believed was prevalent in Japanese comics
, and his disgust at homosexuality
. He was also going through a period of discovering what it was he believed about Christianity
, a topic he would revisit throughout his life and career.
Brown was exploring some of the Freudian
ideas the Surrealists
made use of that he had discovered in Wallace Fowlie's Age of Surrealism. Brown said, "surrealist writers believed that in creating spontaneously they could get in touch with The Unconscious
", which helped him find a direction for his work at a time when he admits he "had nothing to say". Following this path, he included certain scenes and images that made even himself uncomfortable; for example, the recurring Pygmy
characters and their "ooga booga" language, which reinforced "old colonial imaging of 'third world natives'", according to Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics Journal
.
. Religious imagery abounds throughout the book—early on is a scene in which a fictional mediaeval
"Saint Justin" puts off the advances of his wife, only to have her catch him masturbating
while she is out chopping wood. She gets her revenge on him by chopping off
his hand with the axe she was chopping wood with.
This imagery comes back to haunt Chet Doodley, who had an alternate version of this story read to him by his mother from a children's book of saints, in which "Saint Justin" cuts off his own hand to prevent himself from sin
ning, quoting Jesus: "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off". As an adult, the adulterous Chet loses his hand for no apparent reason. After having it unsatisfactorily sewn back on, he has a dream in which the Virgin Mary
has sex with him, before turning into his girlfriend, Josie, who pulls his hand off. He also comes across a book titled Lives of the Saints, and reads once more about "Saint Justin". He calls Josie out to the woods, where he murders he while they have sex, saying, "[Y]ou have to cut off from yourself the thing that is making you sin." His hand is restored, and he prays
to God
.
While not part of the Ed story, Brown had been running straight adaptations
of the Gospel
s of Mark
and Matthew
during most of Eds run in Yummy Fur, a contrast which caught the attention of many. R. Fiore, writing in The Comics Journal
, called this "the best exploration of Christian mythology since Justin Green's Binky Brown
", comparing Chet's excessive Christian guilt
with the "almost childlike retelling" of Mark.
, the seven issues of which were reprinted in the first three issues of the Vortex Comics
-published Yummy Fur
. Ed ended up running in the first 18 issues Yummy Fur, with other backup features (most notably, Brown's Gospel adaptations
). Originally, Brown had intended Ed to be his main, ongoing character, and had not planned to have an ending to the series, but by the eighteenth issue he felt the need to change directions. He quickly brought the series to an end (although it would not be the only ending), and began doing
autobiographical comics
and changed his drawing style.
Brown believes the story came to a "natural" conclusion at the end of Yummy Fur #12. This story is what made up the first Ed collection, which was intended to be the first in a series of Ed books, much like Hergé
's Tintin
series. However, he had "come to hate most of the Ed instalments from issues 13 to 18", and thought the ending in issue #12 was a fitting one. On the other hand, Brown felt that Josie's story had not properly wrapped up. While Josie's revenge on Chet could be seen as resolution, Brown "couldn't let Josie get away with it", as he saw the revenge impulse negatively, and devised an ending to reflect his belief, in which Josie ends up in Hell with Chet.
While Ed was the main feature of Yummy Fur until Brown switched gears
to autobiographical comics
, it was notably juxtaposed against his straight adaptations
of the gospel
s of Mark
and Matthew
, which filled up the rest of the Yummy Fur issues starting with #4.
Drawn and Quarterly
(Brown's publisher since 1991) reissued the contents of the Definitive Ed collection in a nine issue series on smaller-sized pages from 2005 to 2006 titled Ed the Happy Clown, with new covers, previously unpublished art and extensive commentary by Brown.
Brown had devised a new ending to Ed the Happy Clown around 2001–02 while working on Louis Riel
. After finishing that book, he dug out the ending again and started revising Ed to incorporate this new ending, which included added material earlier in the book to foreshadow
the new ending. Soon he found himself rewriting and redrawing the whole story, this time working from a script. Drawn and Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros began to suspect what Brown had been doing in secret, so in order to distract him, Brown suggested re-serializing the "definitive" Ed collection, along with endnotes, which Oliveros went with. This version of Ed will be issued in a book collection called, Ed the Happy Clown: a Graphic Novel, by Drawn and Quarterly in mid-2012.
Brown penciled about 100 pages of the revised version, but stopped because he believed the new version wasn't any better than the original.
publisher Bill Marks had a panel of the Ed story in Yummy Fur #4 censored
. The panel occurred during a scene in which a fictional "Saint Justin" was masturbating after putting off his wife's advances. In the panel, "Saint Justin" had just finished ejaculating
all over his hand—his penis is unobstructed and in full view, with his semen-covered hand clearly visible behind it. Marks had the panel covered up with another illustration after discussing it with Brown. Brown was "annoyed" by this censorship, but agreed to go along with it. Marks later admitted it was a mistake that he wouldn't make again, and indeed when Brown included a scene in the following issue of Ronald Reagan
's head vomiting when he realizes he has been attached to Ed's penis, Marks made no objection, and all future collections of Ed restored the censored panel. When the panel was originally censored, Brown made clear to readers what was being censored with the note:
In stores, Yummy Fur was often wrapped in plastic with "adults only" labels on it. It is not known if Ed or Yummy Fur were ever ban
ned from any stores, but it was dropped for a number of issues for by the comics distributor
, Diamond, purportedly for low sales, despite the fact that it continued to distribute other Vortex titles with lower sales figures.
Yummy Fur was also dropped by a printer in the province
of Ontario
. The printer had used discarded pages of of the fourth issue of Yummy Fur to pack boxes of a feminist publication. The issue included a nude scene from the Ed serial in which the janitor
, Chet, stabs the vampire
, Josie, while having sex with her. The feminist publisher lodged a complaint, and the printer informed Brown's publisher that they would not be handling the book anymore. The third issue of the Drawn and Quarterly Ed series was seized at the Canadian border, but was then deemed admissible.
.
The first, from 1989, was published by Vortex Comics
before Brown had decided to finish the story. It collects the Ed stories from the first 12 issues of Yummy Fur. This edition also contained a cartoon foreword
penned by American Splendor
writer Harvey Pekar
which was drawn by Brown. It was this edition that won Brown one of his two Harvey Award
s in 1990, for Best Graphic Album, and a U.K. Comic Art Award the same year for Best Graphic Novel
/Collection.
The second, also put out by Vortex, came out in 1992, after Brown had taken Yummy Fur to Drawn and Quarterly
. This was labeled a "definitive" edition, but was abridged, dropping most of the material from after Chet's death. Its ending also differed from the one in Yummy Fur—Chet's severed hand exacts revenge on Josie, and the couple find themselves wordlessly embracing in the fires of Hell. The "definitive" title was not Brown's idea, but was chosen by Vortex for marketing reasons. Brown would rather not have had "definitive" on the cover, as he was not completely happy with the ending, but allowed Vortex's Bill Marks to go ahead with it.
The third edition, this time from Drawn and Quarterly, has been announced for May 2012, and will contain a foreword by Brown and extensive notes and appendices.
, Harold Gray and Jack Kirby
, was distinct from his predecessors. He continued to mature as an artist and draughtsman throughout the run of Ed, showing enormous growth from the beginning to end of the graphic novel.
, which he placed on a block of wood on his lap instead of a drawing board. He used a number of different drawing tools, including Rapidograph technical pens, markers
, crowquill pens
and ink brush
es, the latter of which he called his favourite tool toward the end of the story's run, although he didn't use it much as he felt he couldn't work fast enough with a brush. He also had artwork printed from photocopies
from his pencils, which was both faster to produce and had a more spontaneous feel.
The pre-Vortex
stories had been done using a brush, but when Brown committed himself to a regular schedule, felt felt that would be too slow, and switched to cheap markers to increase his productivity. Shortly after, he switched to pencil, which years later he acknowledged as a mistake—the pencil pages he deems "too raw", lacking the "fluid grace" of a brushline. While he was not using a brush for drawing, he was still using one to fill in blacks and to letter his dialogue balloons
.
Usually, he would first roughly sketch in with a light blue pencil
, go over it in more detail in HB pencil, at which stage "most of the work [was] done", and then fill in blacks and dark areas with a brush. By photocopying before sending the artwork to the printer, Brown could ensure that the copy printed from was sufficiently black. While he occasionally scripted certain pages or scenes, he often did not, and would often write in dialogue
only after having drawn the artwork. The artwork was done rather freely, with Brown not feeling the need to rule
his lines or lettering.
The stories were not planned out, but Brown would sometimes have an idea for a scene or more. Some ideas he found would carry him for up to two to three issues of Yummy Fur. Brown made use of flashback
scenes done from a different perspective to change scenes that otherwise would have been set in stone—for example, when Brown revisited the scene of Josie's murder, he placed Ed behind a bush, linking their fates. When he had originally done the murder scene, he "didn't know that Ed was over in the bushes a couple feet away". Brown made use of this technique to alter the story to his needs.
While the make-it-up-as-you-go-along method worked to a degree, Brown also found himself dissatisfied with much of the work, later abandoning about a hundred pages of it which he no longer intends to have reprinted. He also found that the method didn't work as well with his abandoned Underwater
, after which he turned to more carefully scripting out his stories.
, such as Werewolf by Night
and Frankenstein's Monster
, drawn by artists like Mike Ploog
; and DC
comics like Swamp Thing by artists like Bernie Wrightson
and Jim Aparo
.
Since graduating from high school, Brown had been inching towards underground comix, starting with the work of Richard Corben
and especially Moebius
in Heavy Metal
, and eventually getting over his disgust over Robert Crumb
's sex-laden comics to become a huge fan of the Zap
and Weirdo artist. He says the book that finally pulled him over into the underground was The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, which included Crumb as well as Art Spiegelman
's original short Maus
story. He was also affected by Will Eisner
's graphic novel
, A Contract with God
. Brown had already been an Eisner fan, but this book was different, "something that wasn't about a character with a mask on his face". He started drawing in a more underground style, and submitting work to Raw
, Last Gasp
and Fantagraphics
. The work was rejected from these publishers for one reason or another, and Brown was eventually convinced by his friend Kris Nakamura, who was active in the Toronto small press scene, to take it and self-publish it. His minicomic
, Yummy Fur, was the result, and included the earliest installments of the Ed the Happy Clown story.
The book also drew inspiration from pulp science fiction, religious literature and televison cliché
s, and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie
, which would become a primary influence on Brown's later work—especially Louis Riel
—had an effect on Brown after he discovered some Annie reprint books in the early 1980s.
, and was vilified by women's rights
groups, as well as being off-putting to fellow cartoonists (some of whom, including Craig Thompson
, later came to admire it). D. Aviva Rothschild, author of Graphic novels: a bibliographic guide to book-length comics, found the story akin to "staring at six-day-old roadkill". Even Brown's father was too offended to keep reading after the fifth minicomic
issue, "Ed and the Beanstalk".
However, the book was praised by numerous publications, from The Comics Journal
to mainstream publications like The Rolling Stone, which placed Ed on an early-1990s "Hot" list, and The Village Voice
. Time
placed Ed at #7 on their list of "ALL TIME top ten graphic novels", Fantagraphics
editor/critic/co-publisher Kim Thompson
placed Ed at #27 on his top 100 comics of the 20th Century, and former Comics Journal editor and Comics Reporter blog
ger Tom Spurgeon
called Ed "one of the three best alt-comix
serials of all time".
, placed Ed in a tradition that included Dan Clowes
' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
, Max Andersson
's Pixy and Eric Drooker's Flood!, works in which symbols appear with such frequency and importance to suggest significance, while remaining symbolically empty. He finds predecessors for these works in German Dada
and the Theatre of the Absurd
.
and Seth
, who was taken in by the ambitiousness of Brown's storytelling—"[t]hose brilliant sequences where he would show a situation and then return to it later from a different perspective, like the death of Josie, really blew me away"—and Dave Cooper
, who called Ed "the most perfect book ever".
Others who cite Brown's Ed as an influence on their work include Dan Clowes
, Chris Ware
, Craig Thompson
, Matt Madden
, Eric Reynolds
and the Canadian cartoonists Alex Fellows, whose Doug Wright Award-winning Canvas shows the influence of Ed, and Bryan Lee O’Malley, the latter of whom calls Brown "a Golden God", and whose Lost at Sea was heavily influenced by Ed. Anders Nilsen
calls Ed "completely amazing and one of the best comics ever", placing it in his top five comic books, and citing it as a major influence on his spontaneous Big Questions.
star as Ed, Rip Torn
as president Reagan
and Drew Barrymore
as the First Lady
. In 2000, it was reported that the movie would have a budget of $6,000,000, but it was unable to get the necessary financial backing. A script had been written by Don McKellar
, and later with John Frizzell
.
The movie is alluded to in one installment of a series of strips the City of Toronto
commissioned Brown to do as part of their Live with Culture campaign that was run in Now
magazine for six weeks in 2007. In the strip, a zombie
and his human girlfriend attend of screening of McDonald's still-unmade adaptation. McDonald manages to sneak Brown's graphic novel into scenes in his film The Tracey Fragments
the same year.
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
story by the Canadian cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
, Chester Brown
Chester Brown
Chester William David Brown , is an award-winning, best-selling Canadian alternative cartoonist and, since 2008, the Libertarian Party of Canada's candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in Toronto, Canada....
. It is dark and surreal, and largely improvised, having started from a series of unrelated short comic stories that Brown soon went on to tie together. Ed is a large-headed, child-like children's clown
Clown
Clowns are comic performers stereotypically characterized by the grotesque image of the circus clown's colored wigs, stylistic makeup, outlandish costumes, unusually large footwear, and red nose, which evolved to project their actions to large audiences. Other less grotesque styles have also...
, who is subjected to one horrifying affliction after another.
The story is a dark, humorous mix of genres which includes vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
s, pygmy
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
cannibals, Martian
Martian
As an adjective, the term martian is used to describe anything pertaining to the planet Mars.However, a Martian is more usually a hypothetical or fictional native inhabitant of the planet Mars. Historically, life on Mars has often been hypothesized, although there is currently no solid evidence of...
s, Frankenstein's monster
Frankenstein's monster
Frankenstein's monster is a fictional character that first appeared in Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The creature is often erroneously referred to as "Frankenstein", but in the novel the creature has no name...
, and others. Prominent is its use of scatalogical humour, nudity, sex, body horror
Body horror
Body horror, biological horror, organic horror or venereal horror is horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body. Such works may deal with disease, decay, parasitism, mutilation, or mutation...
and extreme graphic violence
Graphic violence
Graphic violence is the depiction of especially vivid, brutal and realistic acts of violence in visual media such as literature, film, television, and video games...
. Central to the plot are a man who cannot stop defecating
Defecation
Defecation is the final act of digestion by which organisms eliminate solid, semisolid or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus. Waves of muscular contraction known as peristalsis in the walls of the colon move fecal matter through the digestive tract towards the rectum...
, and the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
attached to the head
Glans penis
The glans penis is the sensitive bulbous structure at the distal end of the penis. The glans penis is anatomically homologous to the clitoral glans of the female...
of the protagonist's penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...
. There is much religious imagery throughout the story, including the story of a fictional "Saint Justin" whose right hand was severed by his wife who had caught him masturbating—a story which had a considerable influence on the actions of one of the main characters.
Originally serialized in Brown's comic book Yummy Fur, it was eventually collected in two different, incomplete editions by the defunct Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur...
; later, the contents of the second edition were re-serialized as a nine-issue Ed the Happy Clown series from Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...
, and will be collected again by them in mid-2012.
The story has won a number of awards, including a Harvey
Harvey Award
The Harvey Awards, named for writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman and founded by Gary Groth, President of the publisher Fantagraphics, are given for achievement in comic books. The Harveys were created as part of a successor to the Kirby Awards which were discontinued after 1987.The Harvey Awards are...
, and in 2005, Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
placed it at #7 on its list
TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels
Times List of the 100 Best Novels, is an unranked list of the 100 best novels—and 10 best graphic novels—published in the English language between 1923 and 2005. The list was compiled by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo....
of the 10 best English-language graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
s ever. Canadian film director Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to make an Ed movie, but the project has struggled to get financial backing.
Overview
In the early 1980s, Brown was in a creative rut until he came across a book on surrealismSurrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, The Age of Surrealism by Wallace Fowley. "Embracing surrealistic spontaneous creation", Brown started work on a completely improvised comic which he called Yummy Fur, in which Ed was originally serialized. The story spanned a range of Brown's interests, from political skepticism to scatalogical humour to Brown's childhood interest in vampires and werewolves. The story was dark and surreal, but "both hopeless and funny, a trick moviemakers like Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
and Todd Solondz
Todd Solondz
Todd Solondz is an American independent film screenwriter and director known for his style of dark, thought-provoking, socially conscious satire. Solondz has been critically acclaimed for his examination of the "dark underbelly of middle class American suburbia", a reflection of his own background...
wish they could pull off more regularly."
Ed suffers one indignity after another as the plot gets grimmer and more surreal. His bizarre misfortunes include being chased by cannibalistic pygmies
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature, talking Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
from another universe
Parallel universe (fiction)
A parallel universe or alternative reality is a hypothetical self-contained separate reality coexisting with one's own. A specific group of parallel universes is called a "multiverse", although this term can also be used to describe the possible parallel universes that constitute reality...
. Ed's adventures featured encounters with flesh-eating rats
RATS
RATS may refer to:* RATS , Regression Analysis of Time Series, a statistical package* Rough Auditing Tool for Security, a computer program...
, Martians, the Frankenstein monster and other characters out of traditional genre fiction
Genre fiction
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre....
, but presented with Brown's own twisted, blackly funny sensibility and topped with some dark Christian symbolism
Christian symbolism
Christian symbolism invests objects or actions with an inner meaning expressing Christian ideas. Christianity has borrowed from the common stock of significant symbols known to most periods and to all regions of the world. Religious symbolism is effective when it appeals to both the intellect and...
. Despite his ordeals—being imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, falling in love with a vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
—Ed remained a gentle, childlike innocent, with a Candide
Candide
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best ; Candide: or, The Optimist ; and Candide: or, Optimism...
-like optimism.
The story has had more than one ending, and may have more in the future, with none of the endings being definitive.
Story
The story "defies easy summation", according to author John Bell.Ed begins with the children's hospital he was on his way to visit burning down with all the children in it. A number of short gag strips occur one after the other, having no apparent relation to each other. After 30 pages or so, Brown attempts to tie the mess together into one grand plot.
Ed is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit—he had found the hospital janitor
Janitor
A janitor or custodian is a professional who takes care of buildings, such as hospitals and schools. Janitors are responsible primarily for cleaning, and often some maintenance and security...
Chet Doodley's hand and turned it in to the police, and the police assume he had taken it. While in prison, an unnamed character finds himself unable to stop defecating
Defecation
Defecation is the final act of digestion by which organisms eliminate solid, semisolid or liquid waste material from the digestive tract via the anus. Waves of muscular contraction known as peristalsis in the walls of the colon move fecal matter through the digestive tract towards the rectum...
. His faeces
Feces
Feces, faeces, or fæces is a waste product from an animal's digestive tract expelled through the anus or cloaca during defecation.-Etymology:...
fill up the jail, engulfing Ed. When he emerges, he finds the head of his penis has been replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
from Dimension X, a place much like Ed's but in which the people are considerably smaller. The dimension had a waste problem, which they tried to solve by dumping it into a hole to another dimension. The hole turned out to be the anus
Anus
The anus is an opening at the opposite end of an animal's digestive tract from the mouth. Its function is to control the expulsion of feces, unwanted semi-solid matter produced during digestion, which, depending on the type of animal, may be one or more of: matter which the animal cannot digest,...
of the man who couldn't stop defecating. Reagan's body was left in Dimension X, and the professor, who was the discoverer of the inter-dimensional portal, travels to Ed's dimension to find the head, eventually making contact with the authorities of Ed's world.
Chet Doodley attempts to atone for his unfaithfulness to his wife after inexplicably losing his hand by killing his girlfriend, Josie, in the woods. His hand returns to normal, and he prays
Prayer
Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
to God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
in thanks. He leaves her body while he cleanses the blood off of himself in the river, but when he finishes, the body is gone.
After being beaten up, Ed is dragged into the sewers by penis-worshipping, rat-eating pygmy
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
cannibals, along with the body of Josie, who revives as a vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
in time to save Ed from having his penis lopped off. The two attempt to escape from the sewers when they are accidentally shot by pygmy hunters. Josie dies again, and her disembodied spirit learns from the ghost of Chet's sister, Annie, that she has become a vampire.
The professor from Dimesion X, assisted by members of the staff of the popular Adventures in Science TV show, find Ed and the president in the sewers and bring him to their TV studio. The discovery is big news, and the professor and the president make a TV appearance, but when it is discovered that the people of Dimension X are homosexual, the professor is violently killed, and Ed and the body of the body of Josie are put in confinement. The studio is invaded by the pygmies, however, when they recognize their "Penis God" on the television.
Josie's spirit returns to her body, and she and Ed escape and make their way to the hospital where Chet works. Josie gets her revenge by seducing Chet and killing him before he is able to repent
Repentance
Repentance is a change of thought to correct a wrong and gain forgiveness from a person who is wronged. In religious contexts it usually refers to confession to God, ceasing sin against God, and resolving to live according to religious law...
, thus sending him to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
. In the alternate ending from the 1992 version of the book, much of the latter part of the story is dropped after Chet dies, and Chet and Josie end up in Hell together.
Ed is one of a number of men secretly kidnapped
Kidnapping
In criminal law, kidnapping is the taking away or transportation of a person against that person's will, usually to hold the person in false imprisonment, a confinement without legal authority...
in order for a man, Bick Backman, to have his penis transplanted
Penis transplantation
Penis transplantation is a surgical transplant procedure in which a penis is transplanted to a patient. The penis may be an allograft from a human donor, or it may be grown artificially, though the latter is untested in humans...
with a larger one, in order to please his wife. Out of the lineup of unconscious men, Ed's penis with the President's head on it stands out and is chosen for Backman. After the operation, the authorities raid the hospital and, finding Reagan, take Backman and leave Ed, who has had another penis sewed on in the President's place. The hospital hands Ed over to Mrs Backman, claiming he is her husband.
Mrs Backman takes her "husband" home, but her children are not convinced that he is their father, However, after he has spent some time in the house, they decide "he's way better than the other one". There is a striking resemblance between Ed and Mrs Backman's large, round heads, and eventually it is revealed by her mother that they were twin
Twin
A twin is one of two offspring produced in the same pregnancy. Twins can either be monozygotic , meaning that they develop from one zygote that splits and forms two embryos, or dizygotic because they develop from two separate eggs that are fertilized by two separate sperm.In contrast, a fetus...
s separated at birth
Separated at birth
Separated at birth, usually phrased as a question, is a light-hearted media device for pointing out people who are unrelated but bear a notable facial resemblance, implying that they are twins who were separated soon after being born and presumably adopted by separate families.The title "Separated...
.
While at church, the Backman children are kidnapped by stone aliens, but the children are saved by Frankenstein's monster
Frankenstein's monster
Frankenstein's monster is a fictional character that first appeared in Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The creature is often erroneously referred to as "Frankenstein", but in the novel the creature has no name...
, who lands them in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, where they find their kidnapped father. Josie and Ed's friend Christian rescue the Backmans, returning them to their home. After Ed has his clown makeup restored, he reverts to his cheerful self. When he goes to visit Josie, he learns that her apartment building has burned down, and she was the only casualty. He charred skeleton is brought out, clutching an unburnt hand.
Characters
Ed:A big-headed, childlike clownClown
Clowns are comic performers stereotypically characterized by the grotesque image of the circus clown's colored wigs, stylistic makeup, outlandish costumes, unusually large footwear, and red nose, which evolved to project their actions to large audiences. Other less grotesque styles have also...
with a Candide
Candide
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best ; Candide: or, The Optimist ; and Candide: or, Optimism...
-like optimism, despite the hardships his creator puts him through He's not an active protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
; rather, "things happen to him". He spends much of the story with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
from another dimension for a penishead
Glans penis
The glans penis is the sensitive bulbous structure at the distal end of the penis. The glans penis is anatomically homologous to the clitoral glans of the female...
. He later discovers, after having the president severed from his penis and having a new one attached, that he has a long-lost twin sister.
Brown considers Ed to be an "adult who's pre-adolescent", whose sexuality is not fully formed.
Chet Doodley:A janitor
Janitor
A janitor or custodian is a professional who takes care of buildings, such as hospitals and schools. Janitors are responsible primarily for cleaning, and often some maintenance and security...
working at a hospital, he is plagued with guilt over cheating on his wife after his hand falls off for no apparent reason. After having a dream in which a statue of the Virgin Mary turns into his girlfriend, Josie, and has sex with him, he murders Josie while having sex with her by stabbing her in the back in the woods. Josie, who becomes a vampire afterwards, hunts him down and eventually breaks his neck, sending him to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
.
The character appears in some ways to be a stand-in for Brown himself ("Chet" is short for "Chester"). Brown admits that losing his hand like Chet is one of his phobias, as he wouldn't be able to draw any longer, and so named the character "Chet".
Josie:Chet's beautiful former girlfriend, who becomes a vampire "for actively engaging in a grievous sin" for committing adultery
Adultery
Adultery is sexual infidelity to one's spouse, and is a form of extramarital sex. It originally referred only to sex between a woman who was married and a person other than her spouse. Even in cases of separation from one's spouse, an extramarital affair is still considered adultery.Adultery is...
with her boyfriend Chet, when he murders her by stabbing her in the back. Her vampire self ends up saving Ed from having his penis decapitated by pygmy
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
cannibals, and eventually tracks down Chet and kills him, sending him to Hell. In an alternate ending, she finds herself in Hell as well, eternally embracing Chet while being consumed by fire.
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
:President from an alternate dimension, whose head ends up attached to the end of Ed's penis (a theme that has appeared in a number of other comics, such as The Talking Head (1990) by Paolo Baciliero and Pete Sickman-Garner's Young Tim). In Dimesion X, where he comes from, people are much smaller than in Ed's work, and are homosexual. In Ed's world, homosexuality is illegal.
Originally Brown had intended to use Ed Broadbent
Ed Broadbent
John Edward "Ed" Broadbent, is a Canadian social democratic politician and political scientist. He was leader of the federal New Democratic Party from 1975 to 1989. In the 2004 federal election, he returned to Parliament for one additional term as the Member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre.-Life...
, a left-wing
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
politician and then-leader of the Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
social democratic
Social democracy
Social democracy is a political ideology of the center-left on the political spectrum. Social democracy is officially a form of evolutionary reformist socialism. It supports class collaboration as the course to achieve socialism...
New Democratic Party
New Democratic Party
The New Democratic Party , commonly referred to as the NDP, is a federal social-democratic political party in Canada. The interim leader of the NDP is Nycole Turmel who was appointed to the position due to the illness of Jack Layton, who died on August 22, 2011. The provincial wings of the NDP in...
, as the head of the penis, but changed it to the right-winger
Right-wing politics
In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...
Reagan due to how obscure Broadbent would have been to his American readers—Broadbent would "just[...]be a name to them". He later regretted the decision, saying he could have included an explanation in the back of the book as to who Broadbent was. Neither Broadbent nor Reagan were meant to have been political statements. Brown was not very politically aware at the time, and had only the vaguest notions of what right- and left-wing politics were, although he says he probably would have believed in the NDP's policies at the time had he been more aware of what they were. Years later, Brown became a libertarian
Libertarian
Libertarian may refer to:*A proponent of libertarianism, a political philosophy that upholds individual liberty, especially freedom of expression and action*A member of a libertarian political party; including:**Libertarian Party...
, and while "Reagan was no libertarian", he came to believe that Reagan was the best president of the U.S. since Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States . A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state...
.
Professor Ferron Jones:Professor from Dimension X who discovers the inter-dimensional hole, and secretly makes his way to Ed's dimension to find the missing head of President Reagan when Nancy, the First Lady refuses to approve an expedition. He makes an appearance on TV, but later is killed when it is discovered that the people of his world are homosexual, as homosexuality is strictly forbidden in Ed's world.
Annie Doodley:Chet's dead sister, who guides Josie's disembodied spirit.
Becky Backman:Wife of Bick Beckman, whose penis transplant is interrupted by government agents. Ed is switched for Bick, and handed over to his wife. Ed starts a new life as Becky's husband, but it is later revealed to Becky by her mother that Ed is really her long lost twin brother, from whom she was separated at birth
Separated at birth
Separated at birth, usually phrased as a question, is a light-hearted media device for pointing out people who are unrelated but bear a notable facial resemblance, implying that they are twins who were separated soon after being born and presumably adopted by separate families.The title "Separated...
.
Becky's role is minimized in the collections, as all scenes in which she appears after Ed is handed over to her at the hospital are dropped.
Controversial content
Ed had a large amount of potentially offensive content, including nudityNudity
Nudity is the state of wearing no clothing. The wearing of clothing is exclusively a human characteristic. The amount of clothing worn depends on functional considerations and social considerations...
, graphic violence
Graphic violence
Graphic violence is the depiction of especially vivid, brutal and realistic acts of violence in visual media such as literature, film, television, and video games...
, racist imagery, blasphemy
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
, profanity
Profanity
Profanity is a show of disrespect, or a desecration or debasement of someone or something. Profanity can take the form of words, expressions, gestures, or other social behaviors that are socially constructed or interpreted as insulting, rude, vulgar, obscene, desecrating, or other forms.The...
and more. Brown himself had grown up in a strictly Baptist
Baptist
Baptists comprise a group of Christian denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers , and that it must be done by immersion...
household in which he was not allowed to swear. Some of the shocking content came from Brown confronting himself with things such as his disgust at scatalogical humour he believed was prevalent in Japanese comics
Manga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
, and his disgust at homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
. He was also going through a period of discovering what it was he believed about Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, a topic he would revisit throughout his life and career.
Brown was exploring some of the Freudian
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
ideas the Surrealists
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
made use of that he had discovered in Wallace Fowlie's Age of Surrealism. Brown said, "surrealist writers believed that in creating spontaneously they could get in touch with The Unconscious
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
", which helped him find a direction for his work at a time when he admits he "had nothing to say". Following this path, he included certain scenes and images that made even himself uncomfortable; for example, the recurring Pygmy
Pygmy
Pygmy is a term used for various ethnic groups worldwide whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as any group whose adult men grow to less than 150 cm in average height. A member of a slightly taller group is termed "pygmoid." The best known pygmies are the Aka,...
characters and their "ooga booga" language, which reinforced "old colonial imaging of 'third world natives'", according to Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
.
Religion
Beginning Ed, Brown still considered himself a Christian, although he was not sure what being a Christian meant to himself. Over the course of creating the book, he also went through a period of agnosticism, after which he moved on to considering himself a GnosticGnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
. Religious imagery abounds throughout the book—early on is a scene in which a fictional mediaeval
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
"Saint Justin" puts off the advances of his wife, only to have her catch him masturbating
Masturbation
Masturbation refers to sexual stimulation of a person's own genitals, usually to the point of orgasm. The stimulation can be performed manually, by use of objects or tools, or by some combination of these methods. Masturbation is a common form of autoeroticism...
while she is out chopping wood. She gets her revenge on him by chopping off
Dismemberment
Dismemberment is the act of cutting, tearing, pulling, wrenching or otherwise removing, the limbs of a living thing. It may be practiced upon human beings as a form of capital punishment, as a result of a traumatic accident, or in connection with murder, suicide, or cannibalism...
his hand with the axe she was chopping wood with.
This imagery comes back to haunt Chet Doodley, who had an alternate version of this story read to him by his mother from a children's book of saints, in which "Saint Justin" cuts off his own hand to prevent himself from sin
Sin
In religion, sin is the violation or deviation of an eternal divine law or standard. The term sin may also refer to the state of having committed such a violation. Christians believe the moral code of conduct is decreed by God In religion, sin (also called peccancy) is the violation or deviation...
ning, quoting Jesus: "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off". As an adult, the adulterous Chet loses his hand for no apparent reason. After having it unsatisfactorily sewn back on, he has a dream in which the Virgin Mary
Mary (mother of Jesus)
Mary , commonly referred to as "Saint Mary", "Mother Mary", the "Virgin Mary", the "Blessed Virgin Mary", or "Mary, Mother of God", was a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee...
has sex with him, before turning into his girlfriend, Josie, who pulls his hand off. He also comes across a book titled Lives of the Saints, and reads once more about "Saint Justin". He calls Josie out to the woods, where he murders he while they have sex, saying, "[Y]ou have to cut off from yourself the thing that is making you sin." His hand is restored, and he prays
Prayer
Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
to God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
.
While not part of the Ed story, Brown had been running straight adaptations
Chester Brown's Gospel adaptations
Chester Brown's "eccentric adaptations" of some of the Gospels appeared in his comic books Yummy Fur and Underwater starting with the Gospel of Mark in Yummy Fur #4 in 1987....
of the Gospel
Gospel
A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
s of Mark
Gospel of Mark
The Gospel According to Mark , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Mark or simply Mark, is the second book of the New Testament. This canonical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the three synoptic gospels. It was thought to be an epitome, which accounts for its place as the second...
and Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
during most of Eds run in Yummy Fur, a contrast which caught the attention of many. R. Fiore, writing in The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
, called this "the best exploration of Christian mythology since Justin Green's Binky Brown
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a 44-page autobiographical comic book from 1972 by American cartoonist Justin Green. It was the first long autobiographical work to appear in underground comics, and was extremely personal, detailing Green's childhood struggle with a disorder which in...
", comparing Chet's excessive Christian guilt
Guilt
Guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. It is also a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that...
with the "almost childlike retelling" of Mark.
Publishing History
The story got its start in the second issue of Brown's original Yummy Fur minicomicMinicomic
A minicomic is a creator-published comic book, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. In the United Kingdom and Europe the term "small press comic" is equivalent with minicomic reserved for those publications measuring A6 or less...
, the seven issues of which were reprinted in the first three issues of the Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur...
-published Yummy Fur
Yummy Fur
The Yummy Fur were an indie rock band from Glasgow, formed in 1992, and disbanded 1999. The band was centered around lead singer and guitarist John McKeown, with a regularly changing lineup of other musicians. McKeown has since gone on to form the band 1990s...
. Ed ended up running in the first 18 issues Yummy Fur, with other backup features (most notably, Brown's Gospel adaptations
Chester Brown's Gospel adaptations
Chester Brown's "eccentric adaptations" of some of the Gospels appeared in his comic books Yummy Fur and Underwater starting with the Gospel of Mark in Yummy Fur #4 in 1987....
). Originally, Brown had intended Ed to be his main, ongoing character, and had not planned to have an ending to the series, but by the eighteenth issue he felt the need to change directions. He quickly brought the series to an end (although it would not be the only ending), and began doing
Chester Brown's autobiographical comics
Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown attracted a lot of attention from critics and his peers in the early 1990s alternative comics world when he began writing autobiographical comics in his comic book series Yummy Fur....
autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics are autobiography in the form of comic books or comic strips. The form first became popular in the underground comics movement and has since become more widespread...
and changed his drawing style.
Brown believes the story came to a "natural" conclusion at the end of Yummy Fur #12. This story is what made up the first Ed collection, which was intended to be the first in a series of Ed books, much like Hergé
Hergé
Georges Prosper Remi , better known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. His best known and most substantial work is the 23 completed comic books in The Adventures of Tintin series, which he wrote and illustrated from 1929 until his death in 1983, although he was also...
's Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin
The Adventures of Tintin is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist , who wrote under the pen name of Hergé...
series. However, he had "come to hate most of the Ed instalments from issues 13 to 18", and thought the ending in issue #12 was a fitting one. On the other hand, Brown felt that Josie's story had not properly wrapped up. While Josie's revenge on Chet could be seen as resolution, Brown "couldn't let Josie get away with it", as he saw the revenge impulse negatively, and devised an ending to reflect his belief, in which Josie ends up in Hell with Chet.
While Ed was the main feature of Yummy Fur until Brown switched gears
Chester Brown's autobiographical comics
Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown attracted a lot of attention from critics and his peers in the early 1990s alternative comics world when he began writing autobiographical comics in his comic book series Yummy Fur....
to autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics
Autobiographical comics are autobiography in the form of comic books or comic strips. The form first became popular in the underground comics movement and has since become more widespread...
, it was notably juxtaposed against his straight adaptations
Chester Brown's Gospel adaptations
Chester Brown's "eccentric adaptations" of some of the Gospels appeared in his comic books Yummy Fur and Underwater starting with the Gospel of Mark in Yummy Fur #4 in 1987....
of the gospel
Gospel
A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...
s of Mark
Gospel of Mark
The Gospel According to Mark , commonly shortened to the Gospel of Mark or simply Mark, is the second book of the New Testament. This canonical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the three synoptic gospels. It was thought to be an epitome, which accounts for its place as the second...
and Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
, which filled up the rest of the Yummy Fur issues starting with #4.
Drawn and Quarterly reprint series
| Issues of Ed the Happy Clown (Drawn and Quarterly reprint series) |
||
| # | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | February | 2005 |
| 2 | May | |
| 3 | August | |
| 4 | November | |
| 5 | January | 2006 |
| 6 | March | |
| 7 | May | |
| 8 | July | |
| 9 | September | |
Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...
(Brown's publisher since 1991) reissued the contents of the Definitive Ed collection in a nine issue series on smaller-sized pages from 2005 to 2006 titled Ed the Happy Clown, with new covers, previously unpublished art and extensive commentary by Brown.
Brown had devised a new ending to Ed the Happy Clown around 2001–02 while working on Louis Riel
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography is a highly acclaimed comic book biography of the Métis rebel leader, Louis Riel, by Chester Brown and published by Drawn and Quarterly...
. After finishing that book, he dug out the ending again and started revising Ed to incorporate this new ending, which included added material earlier in the book to foreshadow
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing or adumbrating is a literary device in which an author indistinctly suggests certain plot developments that might come later in the story.-Repetitive designation and Chekhov's gun:...
the new ending. Soon he found himself rewriting and redrawing the whole story, this time working from a script. Drawn and Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros began to suspect what Brown had been doing in secret, so in order to distract him, Brown suggested re-serializing the "definitive" Ed collection, along with endnotes, which Oliveros went with. This version of Ed will be issued in a book collection called, Ed the Happy Clown: a Graphic Novel, by Drawn and Quarterly in mid-2012.
Brown penciled about 100 pages of the revised version, but stopped because he believed the new version wasn't any better than the original.
Censorship
Vortex ComicsVortex Comics
Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur...
publisher Bill Marks had a panel of the Ed story in Yummy Fur #4 censored
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
. The panel occurred during a scene in which a fictional "Saint Justin" was masturbating after putting off his wife's advances. In the panel, "Saint Justin" had just finished ejaculating
Ejaculation
Ejaculation is the ejecting of semen from the male reproductory tract, and is usually accompanied by orgasm. It is usually the final stage and natural objective of male sexual stimulation, and an essential component of natural conception. In rare cases ejaculation occurs because of prostatic disease...
all over his hand—his penis is unobstructed and in full view, with his semen-covered hand clearly visible behind it. Marks had the panel covered up with another illustration after discussing it with Brown. Brown was "annoyed" by this censorship, but agreed to go along with it. Marks later admitted it was a mistake that he wouldn't make again, and indeed when Brown included a scene in the following issue of Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
's head vomiting when he realizes he has been attached to Ed's penis, Marks made no objection, and all future collections of Ed restored the censored panel. When the panel was originally censored, Brown made clear to readers what was being censored with the note:
In stores, Yummy Fur was often wrapped in plastic with "adults only" labels on it. It is not known if Ed or Yummy Fur were ever ban
Ban (law)
A ban is, generally, any decree that prohibits something.Bans are formed for the prohibition of activities within a certain political territory. Some see this as a negative act and others see it as maintaining the "status quo"...
ned from any stores, but it was dropped for a number of issues for by the comics distributor
Distribution (business)
Product distribution is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user.The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing,...
, Diamond, purportedly for low sales, despite the fact that it continued to distribute other Vortex titles with lower sales figures.
Yummy Fur was also dropped by a printer in the province
Provinces and territories of Canada
The provinces and territories of Canada combine to make up the world's second-largest country by area. There are ten provinces and three territories...
of Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
. The printer had used discarded pages of of the fourth issue of Yummy Fur to pack boxes of a feminist publication. The issue included a nude scene from the Ed serial in which the janitor
Janitor
A janitor or custodian is a professional who takes care of buildings, such as hospitals and schools. Janitors are responsible primarily for cleaning, and often some maintenance and security...
, Chet, stabs the vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...
, Josie, while having sex with her. The feminist publisher lodged a complaint, and the printer informed Brown's publisher that they would not be handling the book anymore. The third issue of the Drawn and Quarterly Ed series was seized at the Canadian border, but was then deemed admissible.
Collections
The stories have been collected in three different editions, with significantly differing contents. They were dedicated to Kris Nakamura, a girlfriend of Brown's and the one who convinced him to self-publish the Yummy Fur minicomicMinicomic
A minicomic is a creator-published comic book, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. In the United Kingdom and Europe the term "small press comic" is equivalent with minicomic reserved for those publications measuring A6 or less...
.
The first, from 1989, was published by Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur...
before Brown had decided to finish the story. It collects the Ed stories from the first 12 issues of Yummy Fur. This edition also contained a cartoon foreword
Foreword
A foreword is a piece of writing sometimes placed at the beginning of a book or other piece of literature. Written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book's primary author or the story the book tells...
penned by American Splendor
American Splendor
American Splendor is a series of autobiographical comic books written by the late Harvey Pekar and drawn by a variety of artists. The first issue was published in 1976 and the most recent in September 2008, with publication occurring at irregular intervals...
writer Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar
Harvey Lawrence Pekar was an American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality, best known for his autobiographical American Splendor comic series. In 2003, the series inspired a critically acclaimed film adaptation of the same name.Pekar described American Splendor as "an...
which was drawn by Brown. It was this edition that won Brown one of his two Harvey Award
Harvey Award
The Harvey Awards, named for writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman and founded by Gary Groth, President of the publisher Fantagraphics, are given for achievement in comic books. The Harveys were created as part of a successor to the Kirby Awards which were discontinued after 1987.The Harvey Awards are...
s in 1990, for Best Graphic Album, and a U.K. Comic Art Award the same year for Best Graphic Novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
/Collection.
The second, also put out by Vortex, came out in 1992, after Brown had taken Yummy Fur to Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly
Drawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...
. This was labeled a "definitive" edition, but was abridged, dropping most of the material from after Chet's death. Its ending also differed from the one in Yummy Fur—Chet's severed hand exacts revenge on Josie, and the couple find themselves wordlessly embracing in the fires of Hell. The "definitive" title was not Brown's idea, but was chosen by Vortex for marketing reasons. Brown would rather not have had "definitive" on the cover, as he was not completely happy with the ending, but allowed Vortex's Bill Marks to go ahead with it.
The third edition, this time from Drawn and Quarterly, has been announced for May 2012, and will contain a foreword by Brown and extensive notes and appendices.
| Ed the Happy Clown Collections | |||||
| Date | Title | Publisher | Pages | ISBN | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1989 | Ed the Happy Clown: a Yummy Fur Book | Vortex Vortex Comics Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur... |
198 |
|
|
| 1992 | Ed the Happy Clown: the Definitive Ed Book | 215 |
|
||
| 2012 (planned) |
Ed the Happy Clown: a Graphic Novel | Drawn and Quarterly Drawn and Quarterly Drawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s... |
240 |
|
|
Foreign Editions
| Translations | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Title | Publisher | Date | Translator | ISBN |
| Spanish Spanish language Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the... |
Ed, el payaso feliz | Ediciones La Cúpula | 2006 | Hernán Migoya | |
| German German language German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union.... |
Ed the Happy Clown | Reprodukt | 2008-11-01 | Dirk Baranek |
Style
"Brown arrived in print almost fully formed as an aritist", according to Invaders from the North author John Bell. His style, while showing the influence of artists such as Robert CrumbRobert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
, Harold Gray and Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby , born Jacob Kurtzberg, was an American comic book artist, writer and editor regarded by historians and fans as one of the major innovators and most influential creators in the comic book medium....
, was distinct from his predecessors. He continued to mature as an artist and draughtsman throughout the run of Ed, showing enormous growth from the beginning to end of the graphic novel.
Working method
Brown drew the story one panel at a time one 5"x5" squares of cheap typewriter paperBond paper
Bond paper is a high quality durable writing paper similar to bank paper but having a weight greater than 50 g/m2. The name comes from it having originally been made for documents such as government bonds. It is now used for letterheads, other stationery and as paper for electronic printers...
, which he placed on a block of wood on his lap instead of a drawing board. He used a number of different drawing tools, including Rapidograph technical pens, markers
Marker pen
thumb|MarkerA marker pen, marking pen, felt-tip pen, flow or marker, is a pen which has its own ink-source, and usually a tip made of a porous, pressed fibres; such as felt or nylon.-Permanent marker:...
, crowquill pens
Dip pen
A dip pen or nib pen usually consists of a metal nib with capillary channels like those of fountain pen nibs, mounted on a handle or holder, often made of wood. Other materials can be used for the holder, including bone, metal and plastic, while some pens are made entirely of glass...
and ink brush
Ink brush
Ink brushes are used in Chinese calligraphy. They are also used in Chinese painting and descendant brush painting styles. The ink brush was invented in China, believed to be around 300BCE...
es, the latter of which he called his favourite tool toward the end of the story's run, although he didn't use it much as he felt he couldn't work fast enough with a brush. He also had artwork printed from photocopies
Photocopier
A photocopier is a machine that makes paper copies of documents and other visual images quickly and cheaply. Most current photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process using heat...
from his pencils, which was both faster to produce and had a more spontaneous feel.
The pre-Vortex
Vortex Comics
Vortex Comics was a Canadian independent comic book publisher that operated during the years 1982 to 1994. Under the supervision of president, publisher, and editor Bill Marks, Vortex was known for such titles as Dean Motter's Mister X, Howard Chaykin's Black Kiss, and Chester Brown's Yummy Fur...
stories had been done using a brush, but when Brown committed himself to a regular schedule, felt felt that would be too slow, and switched to cheap markers to increase his productivity. Shortly after, he switched to pencil, which years later he acknowledged as a mistake—the pencil pages he deems "too raw", lacking the "fluid grace" of a brushline. While he was not using a brush for drawing, he was still using one to fill in blacks and to letter his dialogue balloons
Speech balloon
Speech balloons are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comic strips and cartoons to allow words to be understood as representing the speech or thoughts of a given character in the comic...
.
Usually, he would first roughly sketch in with a light blue pencil
Blue pencil (editing)
A blue pencil is a pencil traditionally used by an editor or sub-editor to show corrections to written copy. The colour is used specifically because it will not show in some lithographic or photographic reproduction processes; these are known as non-photo blue pencils...
, go over it in more detail in HB pencil, at which stage "most of the work [was] done", and then fill in blacks and dark areas with a brush. By photocopying before sending the artwork to the printer, Brown could ensure that the copy printed from was sufficiently black. While he occasionally scripted certain pages or scenes, he often did not, and would often write in dialogue
Dialogue
Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
only after having drawn the artwork. The artwork was done rather freely, with Brown not feeling the need to rule
Ruler
A ruler, sometimes called a rule or line gauge, is an instrument used in geometry, technical drawing, printing and engineering/building to measure distances and/or to rule straight lines...
his lines or lettering.
The stories were not planned out, but Brown would sometimes have an idea for a scene or more. Some ideas he found would carry him for up to two to three issues of Yummy Fur. Brown made use of flashback
Flashback
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
scenes done from a different perspective to change scenes that otherwise would have been set in stone—for example, when Brown revisited the scene of Josie's murder, he placed Ed behind a bush, linking their fates. When he had originally done the murder scene, he "didn't know that Ed was over in the bushes a couple feet away". Brown made use of this technique to alter the story to his needs.
While the make-it-up-as-you-go-along method worked to a degree, Brown also found himself dissatisfied with much of the work, later abandoning about a hundred pages of it which he no longer intends to have reprinted. He also found that the method didn't work as well with his abandoned Underwater
Underwater (comics)
Underwater was an alternative comic book by award-winning Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown that was published from 1994 until 1997, when the ambitious project was abandoned unfinished by its creator....
, after which he turned to more carefully scripting out his stories.
Influences
When Brown started to do Ed, he was largely influenced by the comics he had grown up with, especially monster comics from Marvel ComicsMarvel Comics
Marvel Worldwide, Inc., commonly referred to as Marvel Comics and formerly Marvel Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Comics Group, is an American company that publishes comic books and related media...
, such as Werewolf by Night
Werewolf by Night
Werewolf by Night is a fictional character, an antiheroic werewolf in the Marvel Comics universe. The Werewolf by Night first appeared in Marvel Spotlight vol...
and Frankenstein's Monster
Frankenstein's Monster (Marvel Comics)
Frankenstein's Monster is a fictional character based on the character in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The character has been adapted often in the comic book medium...
, drawn by artists like Mike Ploog
Mike Ploog
Michael G. Ploog is an American storyboard and comic book artist, and a visual designer for movies....
; and DC
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
comics like Swamp Thing by artists like Bernie Wrightson
Bernie Wrightson
Bernie "Berni" Wrightson is an American artist known for his horror illustrations and comic books.-Biography:...
and Jim Aparo
Jim Aparo
James N. "Jim" Aparo was an American comic book artist best known for his 1960s and 1970s DC Comics work, including on the characters Batman, Aquaman and the Spectre....
.
Since graduating from high school, Brown had been inching towards underground comix, starting with the work of Richard Corben
Richard Corben
Richard Corben is an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for his comics featured in Heavy Metal magazine...
and especially Moebius
Jean Giraud
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud is a French comics artist. Giraud has earned worldwide fame, not only under his own name but also under the pseudonym Moebius, and to a lesser extent Gir, the latter appearing mostly in the form of a boxed signature at the bottom of the artist's paintings, for instance the...
in Heavy Metal
Heavy Metal (magazine)
Heavy Metal is an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine, known primarily for its blend of dark fantasy/science fiction and erotica. In the mid-1970s, while publisher Leonard Mogel was in Paris to jump-start the French edition of National Lampoon, he discovered the French...
, and eventually getting over his disgust over Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
's sex-laden comics to become a huge fan of the Zap
Zap Comix
Zap Comix is the best-known and one of the most popular of the underground comics that emerged as part of the youth counterculture of the late 1960s. While not believed to be the first underground comic to have been published, Zap is considered to mark the beginning of the "underground comix"...
and Weirdo artist. He says the book that finally pulled him over into the underground was The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, which included Crumb as well as Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
's original short Maus
Maus
Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a biography of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek's life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek's later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of...
story. He was also affected by Will Eisner
Will Eisner
William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...
's graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
, A Contract with God
A Contract with God
A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories is a graphic novel by Will Eisner that takes the form of several stories on a theme. Published by Baronet Books in October 1978 in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback editions — the former limited to a signed-and-numbered print-run of 1,500 —...
. Brown had already been an Eisner fan, but this book was different, "something that wasn't about a character with a mask on his face". He started drawing in a more underground style, and submitting work to Raw
RAW (magazine)
RAW was a comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly and published by Mouly from 1980 to 1991. It was a flagship publication of the 1980s alternative comics movement, serving as a more intellectual counterpoint to Robert Crumb's visceral Weirdo, which followed squarely in the...
, Last Gasp
Last Gasp
Last Gasp is a book and underground comix publisher and distributor based in San Francisco, California.- History :Founded in 1970 by Ron Turner to publish the ecologically-themed comics magazine Slow Death Funnies, followed by the all-female anthology It Ain't Me Babe, Last Gasp soon became a major...
and Fantagraphics
Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...
. The work was rejected from these publishers for one reason or another, and Brown was eventually convinced by his friend Kris Nakamura, who was active in the Toronto small press scene, to take it and self-publish it. His minicomic
Minicomic
A minicomic is a creator-published comic book, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. In the United Kingdom and Europe the term "small press comic" is equivalent with minicomic reserved for those publications measuring A6 or less...
, Yummy Fur, was the result, and included the earliest installments of the Ed the Happy Clown story.
The book also drew inspiration from pulp science fiction, religious literature and televison cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
s, and Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie
Little Orphan Annie
Little Orphan Annie was a daily American comic strip created by Harold Gray and syndicated by Tribune Media Services. The strip took its name from the 1885 poem "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley, and made its debut on August 5, 1924 in the New York Daily News...
, which would become a primary influence on Brown's later work—especially Louis Riel
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography is a highly acclaimed comic book biography of the Métis rebel leader, Louis Riel, by Chester Brown and published by Drawn and Quarterly...
—had an effect on Brown after he discovered some Annie reprint books in the early 1980s.
Reception
Ed was not a book for the squeamishSqueamishness
Squeamishness may refer to either a mild feeling of nausea or the quality of being easily disgusted or upset. May also cause feeling faint or general uneasiness.-Causes:...
, and was vilified by women's rights
Women's rights
Women's rights are entitlements and freedoms claimed for women and girls of all ages in many societies.In some places these rights are institutionalized or supported by law, local custom, and behaviour, whereas in others they may be ignored or suppressed...
groups, as well as being off-putting to fellow cartoonists (some of whom, including Craig Thompson
Craig Thompson
Craig Matthew Thompson is a graphic novelist best known for his books Good-Bye, Chunky Rice , Blankets , Carnet de Voyage and Habibi . Thompson has received four Harvey Awards, two Eisner Awards, and two Ignatz Awards...
, later came to admire it). D. Aviva Rothschild, author of Graphic novels: a bibliographic guide to book-length comics, found the story akin to "staring at six-day-old roadkill". Even Brown's father was too offended to keep reading after the fifth minicomic
Minicomic
A minicomic is a creator-published comic book, often photocopied and stapled or with a handmade binding. In the United Kingdom and Europe the term "small press comic" is equivalent with minicomic reserved for those publications measuring A6 or less...
issue, "Ed and the Beanstalk".
However, the book was praised by numerous publications, from The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
to mainstream publications like The Rolling Stone, which placed Ed on an early-1990s "Hot" list, and The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
placed Ed at #7 on their list of "ALL TIME top ten graphic novels", Fantagraphics
Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...
editor/critic/co-publisher Kim Thompson
Kim Thompson
Kim Thompson is an American comic book editor, translator, and publisher, best known as vice president and co-publisher of Seattle-based Fantagraphics Books. Along with co-publisher Gary Groth, Thompson has for almost thirty years used his position to further the cause of alternative comics in the...
placed Ed at #27 on his top 100 comics of the 20th Century, and former Comics Journal editor and Comics Reporter blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger Tom Spurgeon
Tom Spurgeon
Tom Spurgeon is an American writer, historian and editor in the field of comics, notable for his five-year run as editor of The Comics Journal and his blog The Comics Reporter, which he launched in 2004 with site designer Jordan Raphael.-Books:...
called Ed "one of the three best alt-comix
Alternative comics
Alternative comics defines a range of American comics that have appeared since the 1980s, following the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alternative comics present an alternative to "mainstream" superhero comics which in the past have dominated the US comic book industry...
serials of all time".
Critical views
Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics JournalThe Comics Journal
The Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
, placed Ed in a tradition that included Dan Clowes
Daniel Clowes
Daniel Gillespie Clowes is an American author, screenwriter and cartoonist of alternative comic books....
' Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Daniel Clowes. The book follows a rather fantastic and paranoid plot, very different from the stark realism of Clowes' later more widely known Ghost World...
, Max Andersson
Max Andersson
Max Andersson is a Swedish comic creator and film maker, mostly doing "underground style" and "artistic" comics. His comics have mainly been published in Swedish albums, and in the Swedish art magazine Galago....
's Pixy and Eric Drooker's Flood!, works in which symbols appear with such frequency and importance to suggest significance, while remaining symbolically empty. He finds predecessors for these works in German Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and the Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
.
Awards
| Year | Organisation | Award | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Harvey Award Harvey Award The Harvey Awards, named for writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman and founded by Gary Groth, President of the publisher Fantagraphics, are given for achievement in comic books. The Harveys were created as part of a successor to the Kirby Awards which were discontinued after 1987.The Harvey Awards are... s |
Best Graphic Album for the first edition |
|
| 1990 | U.K. Comic Art Award | Best Graphic Novel/Collection for the first edition |
|
| 1999 | Urhunden Prizes Urhunden Prizes Urhunden Prizes have been given out each year by the Svenska Seriefrämjandet since 1987. There are three categories, Best Swedish Album of the Year , Best Foreign Album of the Year , and the "Unghunden" for best children's comics .The award is named after the comic strip "Urhunden" by... |
Foreign Album | |
Influence
Ed had a large impact on a number of Brown's contemporaries, including fellow Canadians Dave SimDave Sim
David Victor Sim is an award-winning Canadian comic book writer and artist.A pioneer of self-published comics and creators' rights, Sim is best known as the creator of Cerebus the Aardvark, a comic book published from 1977 to 2004, which chronicles its main character in a 6,000-page self-contained...
and Seth
Seth (cartoonist)
Seth is the pen name of Gregory Gallant , a Canadian comic book artist and writer. He is best known for comics such as Palookaville.Born in Clinton, Ontario, Seth attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto...
, who was taken in by the ambitiousness of Brown's storytelling—"[t]hose brilliant sequences where he would show a situation and then return to it later from a different perspective, like the death of Josie, really blew me away"—and Dave Cooper
Dave Cooper
David Charles Cooper is a cartoonist, commercial illustrator and a graphic designer who lives in Ottawa, Canada. In addition to comics, Cooper has worked extensively as a designer, producer, and creator in the field of animation...
, who called Ed "the most perfect book ever".
Others who cite Brown's Ed as an influence on their work include Dan Clowes
Daniel Clowes
Daniel Gillespie Clowes is an American author, screenwriter and cartoonist of alternative comic books....
, Chris Ware
Chris Ware
Franklin Christenson Ware , is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, widely known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he resides in the Chicago area, Illinois...
, Craig Thompson
Craig Thompson
Craig Matthew Thompson is a graphic novelist best known for his books Good-Bye, Chunky Rice , Blankets , Carnet de Voyage and Habibi . Thompson has received four Harvey Awards, two Eisner Awards, and two Ignatz Awards...
, Matt Madden
Matt Madden
Matt Madden is a U.S. comic book writer and artist. He is best known for original alternative comics, for his coloring work in traditional comics, and for the experimental work 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, which is based on the idea of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style...
, Eric Reynolds
Eric Reynolds (comics)
Eric Reynolds is a Seattle-based cartoonist, critic and comics editor who works full-time for Fantagraphics Books doing publicity and marketing. His work has appeared in The Stranger, The Comics Journal, The New York Times, The New York Press and other publications...
and the Canadian cartoonists Alex Fellows, whose Doug Wright Award-winning Canvas shows the influence of Ed, and Bryan Lee O’Malley, the latter of whom calls Brown "a Golden God", and whose Lost at Sea was heavily influenced by Ed. Anders Nilsen
Anders Nilsen
Anders Nilsen is a popular artist and graphic novelist who grew up in Minneapolis and lives in Chicago, IL.He works on an ongoing comic series, Big Questions , which has been nominated several times for the Ignatz Award. In addition, his comics have appeared in the anthologies Kramers Ergot and Mome...
calls Ed "completely amazing and one of the best comics ever", placing it in his top five comic books, and citing it as a major influence on his spontaneous Big Questions.
Movie
Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to make an Ed movie, for which he plans to use Yummy Fur as the title. The film will possibly use stop-motion animation, but the project has yet to get off the ground. At one point, McDonald had hoped to have Macaulay CulkinMacaulay Culkin
Macaulay Carson Culkin is an American actor. He became widely known for his portrayal of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He is also known for his roles in Richie Rich, Uncle Buck, My Girl, The Pagemaster, and Party Monster...
star as Ed, Rip Torn
Rip Torn
Elmore Rual "Rip" Torn, Jr. , is an American actor of stage, screen and television.Torn received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1983 film Cross Creek. His work includes the role of Artie, the producer, on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated...
as president Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
and Drew Barrymore
Drew Barrymore
Drew Blyth Barrymore is an American actress, film director, screenwriter, producer and model. She is a member of the Barrymore family of American actors and granddaughter of John Barrymore. She first appeared in an advertisement when she was 11 months old. Barrymore made her film debut in Altered...
as the First Lady
First Lady
First Lady or First Gentlemanis the unofficial title used in some countries for the spouse of an elected head of state.It is not normally used to refer to the spouse or partner of a prime minister; the husband or wife of the British Prime Minister is usually informally referred to as prime...
. In 2000, it was reported that the movie would have a budget of $6,000,000, but it was unable to get the necessary financial backing. A script had been written by Don McKellar
Don McKellar
-Personal life:McKellar was born in Toronto, Ontario to a lawyer father and teacher mother. He attended Glenview Senior Public School, Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute and later studied English at the University of Toronto's Victoria College...
, and later with John Frizzell
John Frizzell
John B. Frizzell is a Canadian screenwriter and film producer.After several years writing, directing and co-producing the documentary series A Different Understanding for TVOntario, Frizzell joined partners Niv Fichman, Barbara Willis Sweete and Larry Weinstein to found the Canadian production...
.
The movie is alluded to in one installment of a series of strips the City of Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
commissioned Brown to do as part of their Live with Culture campaign that was run in Now
NOW (magazine)
Now is a free weekly newspaper in Toronto, Canada. It was first printed on September 10, 1981 by Michael Hollett and Alice Klein. Now is an alternative weekly mixing arts and entertainment news with political coverage....
magazine for six weeks in 2007. In the strip, a zombie
Zombie
Zombie is a term used to denote an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli...
and his human girlfriend attend of screening of McDonald's still-unmade adaptation. McDonald manages to sneak Brown's graphic novel into scenes in his film The Tracey Fragments
The Tracey Fragments (film)
The Tracey Fragments is a 2007 drama film directed by Canadian Bruce McDonald and written by Maureen Medved, based on her novel of the same name. It stars Ellen Page in the title role, is produced by Sarah Timmins and executive produced by Paul Barkin....
the same year.
See also
- Surreal humourSurreal humourSurreal humour is a form of humour based on violations of causal reasoning with events and behaviours that are logically incongruent. Constructions of surreal humour involve bizarre juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, irrational situations, and/or expressions of nonsense.The humour arises from a...
Sources
- Matt, JoeJoe MattJoe Matt is an American cartoonist. He started drawing comics in 1987 and is best known for his autobiographical work, Peepshow. In addition to his cartooning career, he is known for his large collection of vintage Gasoline Alley comic strips. Matt lived in Canada from 1988 to 2002...
. Peepshow. Kitchen Sink PressKitchen Sink PressKitchen Sink Press was a comic book publishing company founded by Denis Kitchen in 1970. Kitchen owned and operated Kitchen Sink Press until 1999. Kitchen Sink Press was a pioneering publisher of underground comics, and was also responsible for numerous republications of classic comic strips in...
, 1992. ISBN 1-896597-27-0 - Rothschild, D. Aviva. Graphic novels: a Bibliographic Guide to Book-length Comics. Libraries Unlimited, 1995. ISBN 978-1-56308-086-9
- Lanier, Chris. "Pixy and the Post-Nuke Protagonist". The Comics JournalThe Comics JournalThe Comics Journal, often abbreviated TCJ, is an American magazine of news and criticism pertaining to comic books, comic strips and graphic novels...
#174. Fantagraphics BooksFantagraphics BooksFantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the adult-oriented Eros Comix imprint...
, February 1995, pages 96–102 - Juno, Andrea. Dangerous Drawings. Interview with Chester BrownChester BrownChester William David Brown , is an award-winning, best-selling Canadian alternative cartoonist and, since 2008, the Libertarian Party of Canada's candidate for the riding of Trinity-Spadina in Toronto, Canada....
. Juno Books, LLC, 1997. pages 130–147. ISBN 0-9651042-8-1 - Brown, Chester. The Little Man: Short Stories 1980-1995. Drawn and QuarterlyDrawn and QuarterlyDrawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...
, 1998. ISBN 1-896597-13-0 - Pustz, Matthew J. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. University Press of MississippiUniversity Press of MississippiThe University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi:*Alcorn State University*Delta State University*Jackson State University*Mississippi State University...
, 1999. ISBN 978-1-57806-201-0 - Brown, Chester. Ed the Happy Clown. Drawn and QuarterlyDrawn and QuarterlyDrawn and Quarterly is a Canadian comic book publishing company, headed by Chris Oliveros, and based in Montreal, Quebec. Its focus is on graphic novels and underground or alternative comics. Drawn and Quarterly was also the title of the company's flagship quarterly anthology during the 1990s...
. Nine issues (February 2005–September 2006) - Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Dundurn Press Ltd.Dundurn GroupDundurn is a Canadian book publishing company, focusing on works of Canadian literature, history, biography, politics and arts. it was founded in 1972 by Kirk Howard. Dundurn has over 2500 titles in print and currently publishes over 100 new titles a year...
, 2006. ISBN 978-1-550-02659-7 - Wolk, DouglasDouglas WolkDouglas Wolk is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. He has written about comics and popular music for publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Pitchfork Media, and The Believer...
. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Da Capo PressDa Capo PressDa Capo Press, is an American publishing company with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1964 as a publisher of music books, as a division of Plenum Publishers. it had additional offices in offices in New York City, Philadelphia and Emeryville, California...
, 2007. ISBN 978-0-30681-509-6 - Rhoades, Shirrel. Comic Books: How the Industry Works. Peter Lang, 2008. ISBN 978-0-82048-892-9