Chester Brown Vortex and Ed the Happy Clown (1986-1989)
What is Vortex and Ed the Happy Clown?
What is Vortex and Ed the Happy Clown?
Chester William David Brown was born on 16 May 1960 at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He grew up in Chateauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority. His grandfather was history professor Chester New, after whom Chester New Hall is named at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has a brother, Gordon, who is two years his junior. His mother suffered from schizophrenia, and died in 1976 after falling down the stairs while in the Montreal General Hospital. Though he grew up in a predominantly French-speaking province and had his first mainstream success with his biography of French-speaking Metis rebel leader Louis Riel, Brown says he doesn't speak French. He said he had little contact with francophone culture when he was growing up, and the French speakers he had contact with spoke with him in English. Brown described himself as a "nerdy teeneager" attracted to comic books from a young age, especially ones about superheroes and monsters. He aimed at a career in superhero comics, and after graduating from high school in 1977 headed to New York City, where he had unsuccessful but encouraging interviews with Marvel and DC Comics. He moved to Montreal where he attended Dawson College. The program did not aim at a comics career, and he dropped out after a little more than a year. He tried to find work in New York, but was rejected again. He discovered the alternative comics scene that was developing in the early 1980s, and grasped its feeling freedom to produce what he wanted. At 19 he moved to Toronto, where he got a job in a photography lab and lived frugally in rooming houses. At around twenty, Brown's interests moved away from superhero and monster comic books towards the work of Robert Crumb and other underground cartoonists, Heavy Metal magazine, and Will Eisner's graphic novel A Contract with God (1978). He started drawing in an underground-inspired style, and submitted his work to publishers Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp; he got an encouraging rejection when he submitted to Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's Raw magazine. He became friends with film archivist Reg Hartt, and the two unsuccessfully planned to put out a comics anthology called Beans and Wieners as a showcase for local Toronto talent. In 1983 Brown's girlfriend Kris Nakamura introduced him to the small-press publisher John W. Curry (or "jwcurry"), whose example inspired the local small-press community. Nakamura convinced Brown that summer to print his unpublished work as minicomics, which he did under his Tortured Canoe imprint. The sporadically self-published Yummy Fur lasted seven issues as a minicomic. Brown soon found himself at the centre of Toronto's small-press scene. While he found it difficult at first, Brown managed to get the title into independent bookstores, the emerging comic shops, and other countercultural retailers, and also sold it through the growing North American zine network. Yummy Fur had respectable sales through several reprintings and repackaging. Brown and a number of other cartoonists featured in a show called Kromalaffing at the Grunwald Art Gallery in early 1984. He had become a part of Toronto's avant-garde community, along with other artists, musicians and writers, centred around Queen Street West. In 1986, at the urging of Brown's future friend Seth, Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks picked up Yummy Fur as a regular, initially bimonthly comic book. Brown quit his day job to work full-time on Yummy Fur. Starting publication in December 1986, the first three issues of Yummy Fur reprinted the contents of the seven issues of the earlier minicomic, and Brown quit his job at the copy shop. Brown began to weave together some of the earlier unrelated strips into an ongoing surreal black comedy called Ed the Happy Clown. The bizarre misfortunes of the title character include being inundated in the faeces of a man unable to stop defaecating, being chased by cannibalistic pygmies, befriending a vengeful vampire, and having the head of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another dimension. A counterpoint to the at-times blasphemous Ed serial, Brown also began to run straight adaptation of the Gospels, beginning with the Gospel of Mark in a subdued style. What appeared a natural target of satire for the author of Ed was instead a continuing attempt of Brown's to find what he really believed, having been raised a Christian Baptist. The adaptations later continued with the Gospel of Matthew and the apocryphal "The Twin" from the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia, and Brown went through periods of agnosticism and Gnosticism. The offensive content of Ed caused it to be dropped by one printer, and is suspected to be behind Diamond Comic Distributors' decision to stop distributing Yummy Fur starting with issue #9. After The Comics Journal announced they would be investigating the issue, Diamond started distributing it again. In 1989 the first Ed collection appeared, collecting the Ed stories from the first twelve issues of Yummy Fur with an introduction by American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown. At this point, Brown had grown to lose interest in the Ed story as he gravitated toward the autobiographical approach of Pekar, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet, and the simpler artwork of Seth. He brought Ed to an abrupt end in Yummy Fur #18 to turn to autobiography. CANNOTANSWER
Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks picked up Yummy Fur as a regular, initially bimonthly comic book.
Chester William David Brown (born 16 May 1960) is a Canadian cartoonist.

Brown has gone through several stylistic and thematic periods.  He gained notice in alternative comics circles in the 1980s for the surreal, scatological Ed the Happy Clown serial.  After bringing Ed to an abrupt end, he delved into confessional autobiographical comics in the early 1990s and was strongly associated with fellow Toronto-based cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, and the contemporary autobiographical comics trend.  Two graphic novels came from this period: The Playboy (1992) and I Never Liked You (1994).  Surprise mainstream success in the 2000s came with Louis Riel (2003), a historical-biographical graphic novel about rebel Métis leader Louis Riel.  Paying for It (2011) drew controversy as a polemic in support of decriminalizing prostitution, a theme he explored further with Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus (2016), a book of adaptations of stories from the Bible that Brown believes promote pro-prostitution attitudes among early Christians.

Brown draws from a range of influences, including monster and superhero comic books, underground comix, and comic strips such as Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie. His later works employ a sparse drawing style and flat dialogue.  Rather than the traditional method of drawing complete pages, Brown draws individual panels without regard for page composition and assembles them into pages after completion.  Since the late 1990s Brown has had a penchant for providing detailed annotations for his work and extensively altering and reformatting older works.

Brown at first self-published his work as a minicomic called Yummy Fur beginning in 1983; Toronto publisher Vortex Comics began publishing the series as a comic book in 1986.  The content tended towards controversial themes: a distributor and a printer dropped it in the late 1980s, and it has been held up at the Canada–United States border.  Since 1991, Brown has associated himself with Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly.  Following Louis Riel Brown ceased serializing his work to publish graphic novels directly.  He has received grants from the Canada Council to complete Louis Riel and Paying for It.

Life and career

Early life
Chester William David Brown was born on 16 May 1960 at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  He grew up in Châteauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority.  His grandfather was history professor Chester New, after whom Chester New Hall is named at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.  He has a brother, Gordon, who is two years his junior. His mother suffered from schizophrenia, and died in 1976 after falling down the stairs while in the Montreal General Hospital.

Though he grew up in a predominantly French-speaking province and had his first mainstream success with his biography of French-speaking Métis rebel leader Louis Riel, Brown says he doesn't speak French.  He said he had little contact with francophone culture when he was growing up, and the French speakers he had contact with spoke with him in English.

Brown described himself as a "nerdy teeneager" attracted to comic books from a young age, especially ones about superheroes and monsters. He aimed at a career in superhero comics, and after graduating from high school in 1977 headed to New York City, where he had unsuccessful but encouraging interviews with Marvel and DC Comics. He moved to Montreal where he attended Dawson College. The program did not aim at a comics career, and he dropped out after a little more than a year. He tried to find work in New York, but was rejected again. He discovered the alternative comics scene that was developing in the early 1980s, and grasped its feeling freedom to produce what he wanted. At 19 he moved to Toronto, where he got a job in a photography lab and lived frugally in rooming houses.

Toronto (1979–1986)
At around twenty, Brown's interests moved away from superhero and monster comic books towards the work of Robert Crumb and other underground cartoonists, Heavy Metal magazine, and Will Eisner's graphic novel A Contract with God (1978).  He started drawing in an underground-inspired style, and submitted his work to publishers Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp; he got an encouraging rejection when he submitted to Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's Raw magazine.  He became friends with film archivist Reg Hartt, and the two unsuccessfully planned to put out a comics anthology called Beans and Wieners as a showcase for local Toronto talent.

In 1983 Brown's girlfriend Kris Nakamura introduced him to the small-press publisher John W. Curry (or "jwcurry"), whose example inspired the local small-press community.  Nakamura convinced Brown that summer to print his unpublished work as minicomics, which he did under his Tortured Canoe imprint.  The sporadically self-published Yummy Fur lasted seven issues as a minicomic. Brown soon found himself at the centre of Toronto's small-press scene.  While he found it difficult at first, Brown managed to get the title into independent bookstores, the emerging comic shops, and other countercultural retailers, and also sold it through the growing North American zine network.  Yummy Fur had respectable sales through several reprintings and repackaging.

Brown and a number of other cartoonists featured in a show called Kromalaffing at the Grunwald Art Gallery in early 1984.  He had become a part of Toronto's avant-garde community, along with other artists, musicians and writers, centred around Queen Street West.  In 1986, at the urging of Brown's future friend Seth, Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks picked up Yummy Fur as a regular, initially bimonthly comic book. Brown quit his day job to work full-time on Yummy Fur.

Vortex and Ed the Happy Clown (1986–1989)

Starting publication in December 1986, the first three issues of Yummy Fur reprinted the contents of the seven issues of the earlier minicomic, and Brown quit his job at the copy shop.  Brown began to weave together some of the earlier unrelated strips into an ongoing surreal black comedy called Ed the Happy Clown.  The bizarre misfortunes of the title character include being inundated in the faeces of a man unable to stop defaecating, being chased by cannibalistic pygmies, befriending a vengeful vampire, and having the head of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another dimension.

A counterpoint to the at-times blasphemous Ed serial, Brown also began to run straight adaptation of the Gospels, beginning with the Gospel of Mark in a subdued style.  What appeared a natural target of satire for the author of Ed was instead a continuing attempt of Brown's to find what he really believed, having been raised a Christian Baptist.  The adaptations later continued with the Gospel of Matthew and the apocryphal "The Twin" from the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia, and Brown went through periods of agnosticism and Gnosticism.

The offensive content of Ed caused it to be dropped by one printer, and is suspected to be behind Diamond Comic Distributors' decision to stop distributing Yummy Fur starting with issue #9.  After The Comics Journal announced they would be investigating the issue, Diamond started distributing it again.

In 1989 the first Ed collection appeared, collecting the Ed stories from the first twelve issues of Yummy Fur with an introduction by American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown.  At this point, Brown had grown to lose interest in the Ed story as he gravitated toward the autobiographical approach of Pekar, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet, and the simpler artwork of Seth.  He brought Ed to an abrupt end in Yummy Fur #18 to turn to autobiography.

Autobio and Drawn & Quarterly (1990–1992)

The 19th issue of Yummy Fur began his autobiographical period.  First came the strip "Helder", about a violent tenant in Brown's boarding house, followed by "Showing 'Helder'", about the creation of "Helder" and the reactions of Brown's friends to the work-in-progress.  With "Showing 'Helder'" Brown breaks from his earlier syle by giving the panels no borders and arranging them organically on the page—a style that was to characterize his work of this period.  He found his friends were uncomfortable with his writing about their lives, and soon turned to his adolescence for source material.

Brown began the first installment of what was to become the graphic novel The Playboy in Yummy Fur #21, under the title Disgust.  The revealing, confessional story tells of the teenage Brown's feelings of guilt over his obsessive masturbating over the Playmates of Playboy magazine, and the difficulties he had relating to women even into adulthood.  Critical and fan reception was strong, though it drew some criticism from those who saw it glorifying pornography.  Playboys publisher Hugh Hefner wrote Brown a letter of concern that Brown could feel such guilt in a post-sexual revolution world.  It appeared in a collected edition titled The Playboy in 1992.

Around this time, Brown had become friends with the cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt. The three became noted for doing confessional autobio comics in the early 1990s, and for depicting each other in their works. In 1993, they did an interview together in The Comics Journals autobiographical comics issue. Seth had joined the new Montreal-based comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, which had also started publishing Julie Doucet. D&Q's Chris Oliveros had been courting Brown to join as well, but Brown had felt loyal to Bill Marks for giving him his first break. When his contract came up in 1991, however, Oliveros offered Brown nearly double the royalty he was getting from Vortex. Brown moved to D&Q starting with Yummy Fur #25.

Vancouver and Underwater (1992–1997)

In 1992, Brown began a relationship with musician Sook-Yin Lee, and in 1993 moved to Vancouver to be with her.  He stayed there with her until 1995, when Lee began as VJ at MuchMusic in Toronto, and the two moved back there together.

Brown moved away from autobio after the conclusion of Fuck, and for his next major project, Chris Oliveros convinced him to change the title, believing the title Yummy Fur was no longer a fitting one for the direction that Brown's work had taken, and that the title made the book harder to sell.  His next work, Underwater, would appear under its own title, while continuing the Gospel of Matthew adaptation as a backup feature.

Underwater was an ambitious work.  Its lead character, Kupifam, was an infant who was surrounded by an encoded gibberish-like language, which she comes to understand in bits and pieces.  Fans and critics gave the series a lukewarm reception, with its glacial pacing and obscure narrative.  Eventually, Brown came to feel he had gotten in over his head with the scope of the project.  In early 1998, he decided to leave it in an unfinished state.

Partway through the series, in 1996, Brown and Lee broke up.  They continued to live with each other, and have continued to be close friends.  Brown came to decide that he no longer wanted to have exclusive relations with women, but also realized he lacked the social skills to pick up girls for casual sex.  He spent the next few years celibate.

Louis Riel and frequenting of prostitutes (1998–2003)

Brown's father died in 1998 as he was putting together his collection of short strips, The Little Man.  He lost interest in Underwater, and had been reading about Métis resistance leader Louis Riel, and decided he wanted to do a biography on him.  He wanted to do it as an original graphic novel, but Chris Oliveros convinced him to serialize it first. Drawn & Quarterly put out the ten issues of Louis Riel from 1999 until 2003, and with help from a CAD$16,000 grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts, the finished annotated collection appeared in 2003, to much acclaim and healthy sales.  In Canada it became a bestseller, a first for a Canadian graphic novel.

In 1999, after three years of celibacy, Brown decided he would start frequenting prostitutes.  His open nature prevented him from hiding this fact from his friends, and the fact soon became widely known.  After completing Louis Riel, he embarked upon another autobiographical graphic novel that would detail his experiences as a john.  This time, the work would not be serialized, and would wait until 2011 to be published as Paying for It.

In the early 2000s, Brown moved out from the place he shared with Lee and got himself a condominium, where he lived by himself, and was free to bring prostitutes home.  Around this time, Joe Matt moved back to the US, and Seth moved to Guelph, Ontario, breaking up the "Toronto Three".

Libertarianism and Paying for It (2004–present)

While reading up on issues surrounding Louis Riel, Brown became increasingly interested in property rights.  His reading eventually took him to believe that countries with strong property rights prospered, while those without them did not.  This path gradually led him to espouse the ideology of libertarianism.  He joined the Libertarian Party of Canada and ran as the party's candidate in the riding of Trinity—Spadina in Toronto in the 2008 and 2011 federal elections.

During the long wait between Louis Riel and Paying for It, Brown allowed Drawn & Quarterly to reprint Ed the Happy Clown as a serial comic book, with explanatory notes that were becoming both more common and more detailed in Brown's work.  In 2007 Brown provided six weeks worth of strips to Toronto's NOW magazine as part of the "Live With Culture" ad campaign.  The strip features a male zombie and a living human girl participating in various cultural activities, culminating in the two going to a movie theatre to watch Bruce McDonald's yet-unmade Yummy Fur adaptation.

Brown's next graphic novel, Paying for It, came out during the 2011 election, in which he was running.  Again he finished with the help of a Canada Council grant.  It was a polemic promoting the decriminalization of prostitution, and attracted praise for its artistry and bare-all honesty, and criticism for its subject matter and Brown's perceived naïveté where brushes aside concerns about human trafficking and dismisses drug addiction as a myth.  At about this time, Brown finally stated he didn't intend to finish his Gospel of Matthew, which had been on hiatus since 1997.

In 2016 Brown followed up Paying for It with Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, made up of adaptations of stories from the Bible that Brown believes promote pro-prostitution attitudes among early Christians, and argues for the decriminalization of prostitution.  Brown declared his research determined that Mary, mother of Jesus, was a prostitute, that early Christians practised prostitution, and that Jesus' Parable of the Talents should be read in a pro-prostitution light.  Brown describes himself as a Christian who is "not at all concerned with imposing 'moral' values or religious laws on others" and believes that Biblical figures such as Abel and Job "find favour with God because they oppose his will or challenge him in some way".

Personal life

Religion

Brown was brought up in a Baptist household,  and in his early twenties he began adapting the Gospels. Brown later said that this "was a matter of trying to figure out whether  even believed the Christian claims—whether or not Jesus was divine". During this time, Brown went through periods where he considered himself an agnostic then a gnostic. Since then, Brown has consistently described himself as religious, but has alternated between periods of identifying as a Christian and simply believing in God. As of 2016, Brown describes himself as a Christian.

Politics

In the 1980s Brown expressed sympathy for left-wing politics, although he has stated his understanding of politics was not deep. He considered himself an anarchist until, while researching Louis Riel, he became interested in issues of property rights, especially influenced by his reading of Tom Bethell's The Noblest Triumph, a book which argues that the West owes its prosperity to having established strong property rights.  Brown thus gained an interest in libertarianism–a belief that government should protect property rights (although, he says, not copyrights), and otherwise should mostly keep out of people's lives.  After attending a few meetings of the Libertarian Party of Canada, he was asked to run for Parliament, and collected the 100 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot.

Brown ran as the Libertarian Party's candidate for the riding (or constituency) of Trinity—Spadina in the 2008 federal election.  He came in fifth out of seven candidates.  He stood in the same riding for the same party in the 2011 Canadian federal election, coming in fifth out of six candidates.  The 2011 election coincided with the release of Paying for It, in which Brown talks about his frequenting prostitutes.  He was worried his promotion of that topic in the media would make the Libertarian Party uncomfortable with having him run, but his official Party agent and the Ontario representative assured him that, as libertarians, they believed in individual freedom, and would continue to support his candidacy.

Personal relations

A longtime friend of fellow cartoonists Joe Matt and Seth, Brown has been regularly featured in their autobiographical comics over the years, and collaborated with them on various projects.  The three were often mentioned together, and have been called "the Three Musketeers of alternative comics" and the "Toronto Three", forming "a kind of gutter rat pack trying to make it through their drawing boards in 1990s Toronto".  Brown dedicated The Playboy to Seth, and Paying for It to Matt. Seth dedicated his graphic novel George Sprott to Brown ("Best Cartoonist, Best Friend").

Brown had a long-term relationship with the musician, actress and media personality Sook-Yin Lee from 1992 until 1996.  She is depicted in several of his comics. He moved to Vancouver for two years to be with her, and moved back to Toronto with her when she became a VJ for MuchMusic. He also drew the cover for her 1996 solo album Wigs 'n Guns.  Brown's relationship with Lee is the last boyfriend/girlfriend relationship he had, as he explains in Paying for It.  They remain good friends, and Brown has contributed artwork to her productions as recently as 2009's Year of the Carnivore.

Work

Thematic subjects

Throughout his early years as a cartoonist he mostly experimented with drawing on the darker side of his subconscious, basing his comedy on free-form association, much like the surrealist technique Automatism. An example of such methods in Brown's work can be found in short one-pagers where he randomly selects comic panels from other sources and then mixes them up, often altering the dialogue. This produced an experimental, absurdist effect in his early strips.

Brown first discusses mental illness in his strip "My Mother Was A Schizophrenic". In it, he puts forward the anti-psychiatric idea that what we call "schizophrenia" isn't a real disease at all, but instead a tool our society uses to deal with people who display socially unacceptable beliefs and behaviour. Inspired by the evangelical tracts of Jack T. Chick, Brown left Xeroxes of these strips at bus stops and phone booths around Toronto so its message would reach a wider audience.  It first appeared in Underwater #4, and is also reprinted in the collection The Little Man.

Brown's Louis Riel book was inspired by the alleged mental instability of Riel, and Brown's own anarchist politics, and he began his research for the book in 1998. Over the course of researching for the book, he shifted his politics over the course of several years until he was a libertarian.  Regarding anarchy, Brown has said, "I'm still an anarchist to the degree that I think we should be aiming towards an anarchist society but I don't think we can actually get there. We probably do need some degree of government."

Art style

Brown's drawing style has evolved and changed a lot throughout his career.  He's been known to switch between using Rapidograph pens, dip pens, brushes, pencils and markers for his black-and-white cartooning, and has used paints for some colour covers (notably in Underwater).

Working method

Brown does not follow the tradition of drawing his comics by the page – he draws them one panel at a time, and then arranges them on the page.  In the case of his acclaimed graphic novels The Playboy and I Never Liked You, this allowed him to rearrange the panels on the page as he saw fit.  In the case of I Never Liked You, this resulted in a different page count in the book collection than was in the Yummy Fur serialization.  The panels were slightly rearranged again when the "New Definitive Edition" of I Never Liked You was released in 2002.  Brown depicted himself making comics in this way in the story Showing Helder in Yummy Fur #20 (also collected in The Little Man).  Despite drawing his panels individually, he says his "brain doesn't tend to think in terms of one image at a time", so that he has difficulty coming up with one-image covers.

He has used a number of different drawing tools, including Rapidograph technical pens, markers, crowquill pens and ink brushes, the latter of which he has called his favourite tool, for its "fluid grace". For much of Ed the Happy Clown, he had artwork printed from photocopies of his pencils, which was faster for him than inking the work, and produced a more spontaneous feel, but in the end he turned away from this method, feeling it was "too raw".

Drawing influences

In an interview with Seth, Brown says his earliest childhood cartoon was an imitation of Doug Wright's Little Nipper. He frequently mentions Steve Gerber as amongst his foremost influences of his teenage years. From about the age of 20, Brown discovered the work of Robert Crumb and other underground artists, as well as class comic strip artists such as Harold Gray, whose influence is most evident in Brown's Louis Riel.

Brown often talks of contemporaries Seth, Joe Matt and Julie Doucet's influence on his work, especially during his autobiographical period.  He also had been reading the Little Lulu Library around this time, and credit's the cartooning of Little Lulu'''s John Stanley and Seth with his desire to simplify his style during this period.

The stiff, stylized look of Fletcher Hanks' comics, reprints from Fantagraphics of which Brown had been reading around the time, was the primary influence on the style Brown used in Paying for It.

Bibliography

Series

Books

Title changes

Many of his books have undergone title changes, sometimes at the behest of his publisher, sometimes without his permission.  Ed the Happy Clown: the Definitive Ed Book was given the Definitive title, despite the fact that he "didn't want to put that as the subtitle of the second edition. Vortex did it for marketing reasons."  The Playboy was originally titled Disgust and then The Playboy Stories, and I Never Liked You was called Fuck (the German translation retains that title). Underwater was originally intended to appear in Yummy Fur, but Brown's new publisher felt they could attract more readers with a different title. Paying For It carries the sense of a double entendre that Brown dislikes–he would have preferred to call the book I Pay For Sex.

Illustration

Brown has also done a certain amount of illustration work. In 1998, he did the cover to Sphinx Productions' Comic Book Confidential #1; in 2005 he did the cover to True Porn 2 from Alternative Comics; and he illustrated the cover for Penguin Books' Deluxe Classics edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence.  Brown illustrated the cover to the 11 July 2004, issue of The New York Times Magazine, an issue whose theme was graphic novels.  He has done the cover for Sook-Yin Lee's 1996 solo album Wigs 'n' Guns (to which he also contributed lyrics for one song), and the poster for her film, Year of the Carnivore.

Collaborations
Brown provided the illustrations for the story "A Tribute to Bill Marks" in Harvey Pekar's American Splendor #15 in 1990, and "How This Forward Got Written" in The New American Splendor Anthology in 1991.

He inked Seth's pencils for the story "Them Changes" in Dennis Eichhorn's Real Stuff #6 in 1992, and shared artwork duties with Sook-Yin Lee on the story "The Not So Great Escape" in Real Stuff #16 in 1993.

He also inked Steve Bissette's pencils for the story "It Came From ... Higher Space!" in Alan Moore's 1963 #3 in 1993.

A jam piece with Dave Sim was included in the Cerebus World Tour Book in 1995.

Recognition

Over the years, Brown has received four Harvey Awards and numerous Harvey and Ignatz award nominations. "The autobiographical comics from Yummy Fur" placed  on the Comics Journal's list of the 100 best comics of the century.  Brown was inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame, on 18 June 2011, at the Joe Shuster Awards in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Brown was one of the cartoonists to appear in the first volume of Fantagraphics' two-volume The Best Comics of the Decade (1990. ).

Awards

Nominations

 See also 
 Alternative comics
 The Beguiling
 It's a Good Life, If You Don't WeakenReferences

Notes

Works cited

 
 
 
 
 
 Brown, Chester.  Ed the Happy Clown.  Drawn & Quarterly.  Nine issues (February 2005 – September 2006)(notes pages unnumbered, counted from first page of notes)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  (in Swedish)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  (followup at The Comics Journal, Notes to a Note on the Notes of Chester Brown)
 
 
  part 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.
  Also available online: parts 1 2 and 3.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Further readingChester Brown: Conversations'' by Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman, with notes by Chester Brown, University Press of Mississippi, 2013

External links

News Briefs featuring Chester Brown at Drawn & Quarterly's website
Time.com interview with Chester Brown
CBC Arts Online article about Chester Brown's Ed The Happy Clown series
Chester Brown induction into CBC Arts Online's Alternative Canadian Walk of Fame
Audio interview of Brown by Seth

1960 births
Living people
Alternative cartoonists
Album-cover and concert-poster artists
American Splendor artists
Anglophone Quebec people
Anti-psychiatry
Canadian anarchists
Canadian cartoonists
Canadian Christians
Canadian comic strip cartoonists
Canadian comics artists
Canadian graphic novelists
Canadian libertarians
Christian libertarians
Christian writers
Film poster artists
Former Baptists
Harvey Award winners for Best Cartoonist
Harvey Award winners for Best Graphic Album
Harvey Award winners for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work
Harvey Award winners for Best Writer
Inkpot Award winners
Libertarian Party of Canada candidates in the 2008 Canadian federal election
Libertarian Party of Canada candidates in the 2011 Canadian federal election
Obscenity controversies in comics
People from Châteauguay
Underground cartoonists
21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers
20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers
Yummy Fur (1983–1994) was a comic book by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown. It contained a number of different comics stories which dealt with a wide variety of subjects. Its often-controversial content led to one printer and one distributor refusing to handle it.

Some of Brown's best-known comics were first published in Yummy Fur, including the surreal, taboo-breaking Ed the Happy Clown and the comics from his autobiographical period, which included the graphic novels The Playboy and I Never Liked You. Also notable were the eccentric gospel adaptations that ran in most issues. The series and its collected volumes have won a number of awards, and have had a lasting influence on the world of alternative comics.

Yummy Fur started as a self-published minicomic which ran for seven issues, the contents of which were reprinted in the first three issues of the Vortex Comics series which started publication in December 1986. The series switched publishers to Drawn & Quarterly in 1991 until the end of its run in 1994, when Brown started on his Underwater series.

Overview
Yummy Fur came at a time when alternative comics was still young, and is considered one of its defining titles. It was one of the earliest examples of a comic that would have its first success as a self-published mini. It started in an era when comic books and their characters were generally considered to be ongoing, and finished when the self-contained stories of the graphic novel had begun to come into prominence. Brown's ambitions changed in step, Yummy Fur started with Ed the Happy Clown, which Brown originally didn't intend to have an ending; towards the end, he serialized two works, The Playboy and I Never Liked You, which were conceived from the start as self-complete works. Brown would thereafter make the production of graphic novels the main focus of his output.

Yummy Fur quickly gained a reputation for taboo-breaking—Ed the Happy Clowns plot revolved around a character who couldn't stop defecating, and whose anus was a gateway to another dimension; then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan's head attached to the end of the protagonist's penis; and a beautiful female vampire, who is out to get revenge on the boyfriend who murdered her, and who usually appears entirely naked. Later, in The Playboy, Brown would detail his adolescent obsession with the Playboy Playmates in Playboy magazine, including explicit scenes of his teenage self masturbating and ejaculating. In the short "Danny's Story", Brown had himself picking his nose, and finished with him biting his neighbour. The book was often wrapped in plastic with an "adults only" label on it, although it is not known if any issues of Yummy Fur were ever banned from any comic shop.

The edgy content of the book was contrasted with his straight adaptations of the Gospels which appeared in most issues of Yummy Fur—albeit, adaptations that took a "warts and all" approach, in which characters pick their noses and Jesus is going bald.

Yummy Fur had been a catch-all title for Brown's work, but since bringing the series to an end in 1994, he has published new stories, like Underwater and Louis Riel, under their own titles. Much of the work from the series has been republished in book form—the short work in The Little Man—but the Gospel stories and most of the later instalments of Ed the Happy Clown remain uncollected.

Stories

Ed the Happy Clown

The story that first drew attention for Brown's work—a surreal, scatological tale of dark humour. The story was improvised for the most part, and grew out of a number of completely unrelated short comics that appeared in the earliest issues of Yummy Fur. The story follows the large-headed, childlike Ed, a children's clown, who, after being submerged in the faeces of a man who can't stop defecating, finds the head of his penis has been replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan.

The story makes use of a wide variety of media and comic-book tropes and clichés, such as vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, aliens, alternative dimensions and cannibal pygmies, as well as a lot of dark religious imagery and potentially offensive imagery—nudity, sex, graphic violence and body horror.

Ed was intended to be a character Brown would use throughout his career, but after the first dozen issues, he grew dissatisfied with the direction the story had taken, and also wanted to change his drawing style. Inspired by the autobiographical comics of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt, Brown decided to bring the Ed story to an end in issue #18 of Yummy Fur and spent the next few years focusing on revealing autobiographical stories.

Gospels

Brown's straight-faced cartoon adaptations of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, started as Brown, who had been raised in a strictly Baptist household, tried to find out for himself what Christ was all about, and what he really believed. The Gospel of Mark began in the fourth issue of the Vortex series, which was the first issue of new material. The Gospel of Matthew started in issue #15 of Yummy Fur and continued in most issues through the end of the series, and in all but the first issue of Underwater. Matthew is unfinished and has not continued since 1997.

Autobiographical comics

After completing Ed, Brown moved on to a series of personally revealing autobiographical stories, starting with "Helder" in Yummy Fur #19. The drawing style, done with a brush, became more and more sparse in an attempt to move away from the style of Ed the Happy Clown, which Brown had grown uncomfortable with. Most of the shorter stories, like "Helder", "Showing Helder" and "Danny's Story", took place not long before they were written, but the longer graphic novels took place mostly in Brown's adolescence in the 1970s.

Disgust/The Playboy

Narrated by a winged, not-so-angelic version of himself, the story details Brown's experiences as an adolescent obsessed with the Playmates in Playboy magazine, while wracked with guilt over his obsessive masturbation, and later his difficulty relating to women as an adult. The story is the source of some controversy, as it graphically depicted a minor masturbating and ejaculating and was also seen by some women to defend pornography.

The story appeared in issues #21–23 of Yummy Fur and was originally titled Disgust and later The Playboy Stories. The story was collected in 1992 under the title The Playboy.

Fuck (or I Never Liked You)

Another tale of Brown's adolescence. Brown has trouble relating with the opposite sex, even when they are the ones trying to connect with him. He is an awkward teenager who never swears, which is picked up by some of the other boys in his school, who constantly pick on him and try to get him to swear.

The story also depicts the final days of Brown's mother when he was 17. Brown is a difficult son, and has trouble expressing his affection for her. She suffers from schizophrenia and dies in the hospital after falling down the stairs.

Originally titled Fuck, the story was retitled I Never Liked You when collected.

Publishing history

Minicomic (1983–1986)

In the early 1980s, Brown had been trying unsuccessfully to get his work published by publishers such as Raw, Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp. He was convinced by his then-girlfriend, Kris Nakamura, to take the work he had piled up and publish them himself as photocopied minicomics, distributing them on the streets of Toronto. Sales got off to a slow start, but eventually picked up. "Sales were brisk", with some issues topping 1000 copies, as Brown sold the books on consignment in bookstores, local comic shops, and through mail order, while working a day job in a photography shop. Brown published the series under the "Tortured Canoe" imprint.

Vortex (1986–1991)

Brown had pitched his work to Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks before 1986, but at the time, Marks was not prepared to publish an ongoing series. In 1986, at the urging of Mister X artist Seth, Marks finally contacted Brown with a contract to publish three issues, which would reprint the entire contents of the seven issue minicomic series. The contract would be renewed depending on sales. The December 1986 first issue received preorders of 12,000 copies, a considerable number for a small-press, black-and-white comic book. The large number of orders was due in part to the black-and-white comics explosion of the mid-1980s, spearheaded by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's breakout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The boom soon imploded, however, and Yummy Fur'''s sales dropped to a few thousand.

The book was dropped by a printer in the province of Ontario after the printer had used discarded pages of the fourth issue of Yummy Fur to pack boxes of a feminist publication. The issue included a nude scene from the Ed the Happy Clown serial in which the character, Chet, stabs his girlfriend, Josie, while they had sex. The feminist publisher lodged a complaint, and the printer informed Vortex that they would not handle Yummy Fur anymore. In 1989, the bindery Packaging Services & Supplies of Wisconisin refused to bind the first Yummy Fur collection and an Omaha the Cat Dancer collection, citing that employees found the content offensive; a spokesman for the company called them "worse than pornography".

Sales saw their lowest point with issue #9, at 1673 copies, largely due to the fact that Diamond Comic Distributors had dropped the book—purportedly for low sales, despite the fact that Yummy Fur had been getting more orders than many other Vortex titles that hadn't been dropped. It was suspected that the book had actually been dropped due to its potentially offensive content. The Comics Journal had begun to investigate the incident, but a few issues later, Diamond started including Yummy Fur in its catalogue again, and sales started to rise, eventually reaching 7000 copies per issue.

Drawn & Quarterly (1991–1994)

Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros had been courting Brown for his newly established Montréal-based company, but Brown was comfortable where he was, and felt loyalty to Bill Marks for giving him his big break. While Marks had a poor reputation for his treatment of other cartoonists, Brown felt that he had been treated well. In 1991, just as his contract with Vortex had come up, Oliveros offered Brown an enticing deal—a 25% royalty, as compared to 13% at Vortex. That, combined with the fact that Julie Doucet and Seth had jumped aboard Oliveros' ship, convinced Brown join Drawn & Quarterly, starting with the 25th issue of Yummy Fur.

Brown didn't want to leave Marks up the creek, and so allowed Vortex to publish a second, "definitive" edition of Ed the Happy Clown in 1992, with a different ending from the one that had appeared in Yummy Fur. Drawn & Quarterly, however, published in the same year the collected version of The Playboy, which had appeared in the Vortex-published issues #21–23 of Yummy Fur, and they have continued to publish all of his work since.

Oliveros convinced Brown that the Yummy Fur title was no longer appropriate for the direction the book had taken, and Brown chose to publish his next major story, Underwater, under its own title. The last issue of Yummy Fur was #32, and was an issue-long instalment of his adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew, which would continue in the pages of Underwater.

Lists of issues

Minicomic

Most issues were eight pages long, and were photocopied on sheets of 8 " x 11" paper, folded in half and stapled together. In February 1985, Brown put out a 48-page, digest-sized compilation of the first six issues, with an extra one-page strip called "Fire with Fire".

Brown filled up the first four issues with material that he had produced since 1980, putting out one issue per month. After the fourth issue, his backlog ran out. He had to start producing new material, and Yummy Furs frequency dropped.

Comic book
All issues had black-and-white contents printed on newsprint, with colour outer covers on heavier stock paper.

Collections
The Ed the Happy Clown storyline has been reprinted in a number of formats since: a 1989 book collecting material from the first 12 issues of Yummy Fur; a 1992 "Definitive Ed Book", which leaves out much of the later material and also provides a completely new ending; and a nine-issue Ed the Happy Clown series from Drawn & Quarterly with new covers, unpublished artwork and extensive commentary by Brown.

The autobiography work has been reprinted as The Playboy: A Comic Book in 1992 and I Never Liked You in 1994, with The Little Man: Short Strips 1980–1995 collecting the remainder, along with other miscellaneous short works from other sources.

Brown decided not to reprint the early Yummy Fur stories which had borrowed from other works. The Gospel adaptations also remain unfinished and uncollected.

Reception
The series was recognized by his peers early on, such as Seth, who recommended to Bill Marks to pick it up as a Vortex title; and got good reviews from publications like The Comics Journal as early as its minicomic days.

Critical views
Joseph Witek wrote of the difficulties Yummy Fur presented—in the context of the "high art/low art" split in alternative comics in the 1980s, best represented by division of visions in Art Spiegelman's Raw and Robert Crumb's Weirdo, the combination of Brown's grotesque adventures in Ed the Happy Clown and the straight renditions of the Gospels seem to straddle this line.

Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics Journal, placed Ed the Happy Clown 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.

Awards
The following are awards or nominations for Yummy Fur or collections of work that first appeared in it:

See also

Autobiographical comics
Eightball (comics)

References

Works cited

 
 Brown, Chester. Ed the Happy Clown''. Drawn & Quarterly. Nine issues (February 2005–September 2006). (notes pages unnumbered, counted from first page of notes)

External links

Dissecting Yummy Fur #19

1983 comics debuts
1986 comics debuts
Drawn & Quarterly titles
Black comedy books
Defunct comics
Horror comics
Comics by Chester Brown
Vortex Comics titles
Canadian comics titles Ed the Happy Clown is a graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown.  Its title character is a large-headed, childlike children's clown who undergoes one horrifying affliction after another.  The story is a dark, humorous mix of genres and features scatological humour, sex, body horror, extreme graphic violence, and blasphemous religious imagery.  Central to the plot are a man who cannot stop defecating; the head of a miniature, other-dimensional Ronald Reagan attached to the head of Ed's penis; and a female vampire who seeks revenge on her adulterous lover who had murdered her to escape his sins.

The surreal, largely improvised story began with a series of unrelated short strips that Brown went on to tie into a single narrative.  Brown first serialized it in his comic book Yummy Fur, and the first, incomplete collected edition in 1989, titled Ed the Happy Clown: A Yummy Fur Book.  Shortly after, Brown became unsatisfied with the direction of the serial; he brought it to an abrupt end in the eighteenth issue of Yummy Fur and turned to autobiography.  A second edition titled Ed the Happy Clown: The Definitive Ed Book appeared in 1992 with an altered ending and most of the later parts of the series eliminated.  The contents of this edition were re-serialized with extensive endnotes in 2005–2006 as a nine-issue Ed the Happy Clown series and collected as Ed the Happy Clown: A  in 2012.

The story is seen by many critics as a highlight of the 1980s North American alternative comics scene. It has left an influence on contemporary alternative cartoonists such as Daniel Clowes, Seth, and Dave Sim, and has won a Harvey and other awards.  Canadian film director Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to make an Ed film, but the project has struggled to find financial backing.

Background

Brown grew up in Châteauguay, Quebec, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority.  He was an introverted youth attracted to comic books from a young age.  He aimed at a career drawing superhero comics, but was unsuccessful in getting work with Marvel or DC Comics after graduating from high school.  He moved to Toronto and discovered  and the small-press community.

By the early 1980s Marvel and DC had come to dominate comic-book publishing in North America, and comic shops became the main places of purchase, with a clientele of dedicated comics fans.  During this time, a trend towards greater ambition and expressiveness was developing on the fringes, such as Dave Sim's long Cerebus series and the avant-garde graphics magazine Raw in which the serialization of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus appeared.  Brown was to find himself in the alternative comics scene that grew throughout the decade.

Brown was feeling himself in a creatively stagnant period when he came across a book on Surrealism: Wallace Fowlie's The Age of Surrealism (1950).  The book motivated Brown to work on an improvised minicomic series which he called Yummy Fur and self-published from 1983.

Content

Ed suffers one indignity after another as the plot gets grimmer and more surreal.  His bizarre misfortunes include 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 penis-worshipping pygmies, flesh-eating rats, Martians, Frankenstein's monster, and other characters from traditional genre fiction.  The story unfolds with a black-comedic sensibility topped with Christian symbolism.  Despite his ordeals—being imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, falling in love with a vampire—Ed remains a gentle, childlike innocent, with a Candide-like optimism.  The story has had more than one ending and is a challenge to summarize.

Summary

The children's hospital Ed is about to visit burns down with all the children in it.  A number of apparently unrelated short gag strips appear  before Brown begins to tie the narrative together into one plot.

Ed is imprisoned when he finds hospital janitor Chet Doodley's severed hand and the police assume Ed had taken it.  In the prison a man is unable stop defecating and his faeces fill the jail, engulfing all, including Ed.  When Ed emerges he finds the head of his penis replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from Dimension X—a world much like Ed's but whose people are tiny.  Dimension X has dumped its waste into a trans-dimensional portal, which turns out to be the anus of the man who could not stop defecating.  Reagan's body remains in Dimension X, and the professor who discovered the portal travels to Ed's dimension to find the head, making contact with the authorities of Ed's world.

Chet believes the loss of his hand is due to his unfaithfulness to his wife; as a child his mother read Chet the story of a Saint Justin who cuts off his right hand to avoid sinning, and Chet assumes his lost hand is a like punishment from God.  He tries to atone for it by killing his girlfriend, Josie, in the woods.  Penis-worshipping, rat-eating pygmy cannibals drag the bodies of both Josie and Ed into the sewers.  As they are about to sever Ed's penis Josie reanimates in time to save him.  The two attempt to escape from the sewers when they are accidentally shot by a mother–daughter team of pygmy hunters.  Josie dies again, and her disembodied spirit learns from the ghost of Chet's sister that she has become a vampire.

The professor from Dimension X and members of the staff of the Adventures in Science TV show find Ed and the President and bring them to the TV studio.  The discovery is big news, and the professor and the President make a TV appearance.  When it is discovered that the people of Dimension X are homosexual or bisexual the professor is put to a violent death, and Ed and the body of Josie are put in confinement.  The studio is invaded by the pygmies when they recognize their "Penis God" on 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.

Ed is one of a number of men secretly kidnapped to provide another, Bick Backman, with a penis transplant—a larger one 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, Mounties raid the hospital and, finding Reagan, take Backman and leave Ed, who has had a larger penis sewn on in the President's place.  The hospital hands Ed over to Mrs Backman, claiming he is her husband.  Though suspicious, she accepts Ed—and his newly transplanted penis.

Endings

The ending that appeared in Yummy Fur has not appeared in book editions.  In it, Mrs Backman takes Ed home, but her children are not convinced he is their father.  After he spends some time in the house they decide "he's way better than the other one".  There is a resemblance between Ed and Mrs Backman, and it is revealed they were twins separated at birth.  While at church, the Backman children are kidnapped by stone aliens and are saved by Frankenstein's monster, who brings them to Washington, D.C. where they find their kidnapped real father.  Josie and Ed's zombie friend rescues the Backmans.  Ed has his clown makeup restored and reverts to his cheerful self.  When he goes to visit Josie, he learns her apartment building has burned down, and she was the only casualty.  Her charred skeleton is brought out, clutching an unburnt severed hand.

The alternate ending from the 1992 and later versions drops most of the story that follows Chet's death,  replacing it with 17 new pages.  In this version, Chet's severed hand visits Josie's apartment at night and rolls up her window shade.  As she is a vampire, the sunlight in the morning burns her to death while she sleeps, and she and Chet are reunited in the flames of Hell.

Primary characters

Analysis

Ed spans a range of Brown's interests, from political skepticism to scatological humour to vampires and werewolves.  The story is dark and surreal, desperate and humorous.

Christian elements especially—largely sacrilegious—are prominent in the book.  They are at first innocuous and unimportant: a zombie named Christian, another character who believes he has found Christ's face on a piece of adhesive tape.  With the fourth issue of Yummy Fur, Brown's surreal take on Christianity becomes central: the cover depicts the Virgin Mary holding not just the infant Christ, but also a severed hand.  Within is the story of Saint Justin, whose amputation becomes a key motif: Chet loses his own hand and finds another; his own appears mysteriously under Ed's pillow.  Only by praying for forgiveness for his adultery and by murdering his lover is Chet's hand miraculously restored.  According to the Lives of the Saints, the fictional Saint Justin severed his own hand, but in another version Brown presents, Justin's wife cuts it off with a woodaxe when she catches her husband masturbating after rejecting her advances.  Despite Saint Justin's story's exposure to the reader as a fraud, Chet's faith in the official version restores his severed hand.  The altered ending from 1992 has both Josie and Chet reunited in Hell, and the ghost of Chet's sister becomes a devil.  As Brown mixes surreal sacrilege with the sort of moralism that compels him to condemn Josie for her bloody revenge, Brian Evenson calls Brown "deft at muddying the waters in a way that makes it very hard to pin him down as either belieever or satirist, as either anti-religionist or apologist".

While not part of the Ed story, Brown had been serializing straight adaptations in Yummy Fur of the Gospels of Mark and of Matthew during most of Ed'''s run.  R. Fiore called these adaptations "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.  Yummy Fur readers also found "I Live in the Bottomless Pit", a short strip in which a man discovers the Antichrist, who after millennia underground has forgotten his mission—a paradoxical one, as he states his orders were from God.Ed prominently features transgressive content including nudity, graphic violence, racist imagery, blasphemy, and profanity.  Brown grew up in a strictly Baptist household in which he was not allowed to swear, as depicted in Brown's graphic novel I Never Liked You (1994).  Brown challenged his own anxieties by tackling subjects such as scatological humour.  Imagery such as the recurring Pygmy characters and their "ooga booga" language, Chris Lanier asserted, reinforce "old colonial imaging of 'third world natives' ".

Style

According to comics historian John Bell, "Brown arrived in print almost fully formed as an artist".  His style, while showing the influence of artists such as Robert Crumb, 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.

Unlike most cartoonists, Brown does not compose his pages, but draws each panel on separate sheets of paper and assembles them into pages afterwards.  The panels in Ed were on  squares of cheap typewriter paper, which he placed on a block of wood on his lap in lieu of a drawing board.  He used a number of different drawing tools, including Rapidograph technical pens, markers, crowquill pens and ink brushes.  He had some photocopies printed from his pencilled work, which he found both faster to produce and more spontaneous in feel.

Brown worked freely, without ruling lines or lettering.  Usually he roughly sketched the artwork with a light blue pencil, then elaborated it with an HB pencil, at which stage he has said "most of the work  done".  Brown inked the pre-Vortex stories with a brush; when he committed himself to a regular schedule, he felt inking with a brush would be too slow, and switched to cheap markers or pencils to increase his productivity.  He continued to use a brush to fill in blacks and to letter his dialogue balloons.  Brown came to favour the quality of the brush again toward the end of the story's run, but found it slow to work with and thus used it less than he would have preferred.  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, more frequently he did not, and often wrote dialogue only after having drawn the artwork.  Brown did not plan out the stories, though he might have certain ideas prepared.  Some ideas he found carried him for up to two to three issues of Yummy Fur.  Brown used of flashback scenes different perspectives to alter the story to his needs—for example, when Brown revisited the scene of Josie's murder, he placed Ed behind a bush, linking the two characters' fates.  When he had originally done the murder scene, he says he did not "know that Ed was over in the bushes a couple feet away".

Brown found himself dissatisfied with much of the work, and later abandoning about a hundred printed pages which he intends not to have reprinted.  He found that the improvisational method did not work well with Underwater in the 1990s; after cancelling that series he turned to carefully scripting out his stories, beginning with Louis Riel.

Influences

When Brown started Ed, he was largely influenced by the comics he had grown up with, especially monster stories from Marvel Comics such as Werewolf by Night and Frankenstein's Monster by artists such as Mike Ploog, and from DC Comics such as Swamp Thing by artists such as 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  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 instalments of the Ed the Happy Clown story.

The book also drew inspiration from pulp science fiction, religious literature and television clichés.  Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie had an effect on Brown after he discovered some Annie reprint books in the early 1980s.  This was to be a primary influence on later work of Brown's such as Louis Riel.

Publication

The story began in July 1983 in the second issue of Brown's original Yummy Fur minicomic, the seven issues of which were reprinted in 1986–87 in the first three issues of the Vortex Comics-published Yummy Fur.  Ed ran in the first eighteen issues of Yummy Fur, along other features, such as Brown's Gospel adaptations.  Brown envisioned Ed as an ongoing character in the vein of Marvel and DC comic-book characters.  In the late 1980s he came to feel restricted by the character; inspired by the revealing autobiographical work of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt and the simple cartooning of fellow Toronto cartoonist Seth, Brown turned to autobiography.

While Ed was the main feature of Yummy Fur until Brown switched to autobiographical comics in 1990, it was juxtaposed against straight adaptations of the gospels of Mark and Matthew, which filled up the rest of the Yummy Fur issues starting with issue 4.

{| class="wikitable" style="float: right;margin-left:1em;"
|-
|+ Issues of Ed the Happy Clown|-
! scope="col" | 
! scope="col" colspan="2"| Date
|-
! scope="row" |1
|February
|rowspan="4" style="text-align:center;"|2005
|-
! scope="row" |2
|May
|-
! scope="row" |3
|August
|-
! scope="row" |4
|November
|-
! scope="row" |5
|January
|rowspan="5" style="text-align:center;"|2006
|-
! scope="row" |6
|March
|-
! scope="row" |7
|May
|-
! scope="row" |8
|July
|-
! scope="row" |9
|September
|-
|}

In 2004 Brown set to work on a revised Ed; he pencilled a number of pages, but stopped when he came to believe the new version was no better than the original.  Drawn & 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.  The contents came mainly from issues two through twelve, and some from issue seventeen.  About 80 pages—a third of the original Ed material—remains uncollected, including the entire 24-page ending that appeared in issue eighteen.

The first collection, Ed the Happy Clown: A Yummy Fur Book, appeared in 1989 from Vortex Comics before Brown decided to end the story.  It collects the Ed stories up to the twelfth issue of Yummy Fur and includes a cartoon foreword scripted by Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown.  It was this edition that in 1990 won Brown one of his two Harvey Awards, for Best Graphic Album, and a UK Comic Art Award the same year for Best Graphic Novel/Collection.

The second edition came from Vortex in 1992, after Brown had taken Yummy Fur to Drawn & Quarterly.  Bill Marks had it labelled The Definitive Ed Book for marketing reasons.  The edition reprinted what was in the first edition with an altered ending and some material from Yummy Fur 17, and excluded most of the material in the series from after Chet's death.

In June 2012, Drawn & Quarterly published a third edition, Ed the Happy Clown: A Graphic-Novel, reprinting the contents of the Ed series of a few years earlier, including somewhat modified endnotes and annotations.  It had a new introduction by Brown, replacing those by Pekar and Solomos in the previous editions.  Compared to those editions, it was printed on higher-quality paper with higher contrast in the printing, and the artwork was reduced in size.  Brown subtitled the book with a hyphen: "graphic-novel".  This reflects Brown's distaste yet reluctant acceptance of the term, as its usage had by then become widespread.  Brian Evenson sees this as a Brown-like eccentricity and a gesture emphasizing the equal importance Brown places on both word and image.  The book was a bestseller.

The 2012 edition also included a ten-page story called "The Door", which Brown redrew from an anonymous public domain story from a horror comic book.  In the story, a couple go through a door in a funhouse which leads through a passage in which they get lost for years.  Their clothes disintegrate over that time, exposing their genitals, until they finally come across another door—one that leads them to Hell.  Brown wrote he found the original story truly horrifying, as the couple had done nothing apparent to deserve their fate.  He had originally intended to incorporate it into the Ed story, but capriciously veered off in another narrative direction.

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
|+ Book collections of Ed the Happy Clown|-
! scope="col" | Date
! scope="col" | Title
! scope="col" | Publisher
! scope="col" | Pages
! scope="col" | ISBN
! scope="col" | Notes
|-
! scope="row" | 1989
| Ed the Happy Clown: a Yummy Fur Book| rowspan="2" style="text-align:center;" | Vortex
| style="text-align:center;" | 198
| 
|
 incomplete
 foreword by Harvey Pekar
|-
! scope="row" | 1992
| Ed the Happy Clown: the Definitive Ed Book| style="text-align:center;" | 215
| 
|
 abridged
 alternate ending
 introduction by Steve Solomos
|-
! scope="row" | 2012
| Ed the Happy Clown: A Graphic Novel| style="text-align:center;" | Drawn & Quarterly
| style="text-align:center;" | 240
| 
|
 extensive end notes and appendices
 additional story "The Door"
|-
|}

The artwork appeared at its largest in the Vortex Yummy Fur issues; it was somewhat smaller in the minicomics and first two collected editions.  The artwork was smallest in the 2012 Drawn & Quarterly edition, a size Brown considered ideal, stating, "The smaller the better, as long as the words are still legible."  The 2012 edition also had wider page margins and gutters between the images.

Reception and legacyEd was seen by many critics a high point of the early alternative comics scene in the 1980s, echoes of which can be seen in such later surrealistic graphics novels as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes and Black Hole by Charles Burns.  The story won praise from The Comics Journal and mainstream publications such as The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, which placed Ed on an early-1990s "Hot" list.  Time placed Ed at seventh on its list of "All Time Top Ten Graphic Novels",  while publisher and critic Kim Thompson placed Ed 27th on his top 100 comics of the 20th Century, and editor and critic Tom Spurgeon called Ed "one of the three best alt-comix serials of all time".  The book appeared in Gene Kannenberg's 500 Essential Graphic Novels (2008).Ed had a large impact on a number of Brown's contemporaries, including fellow Canadians Dave Sim and Seth, the latter of whom was taken in by the ambitiousness of Brown's storytelling, saying "Those 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 Ed as an influence on their work include Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Craig Thompson, Matt Madden, Eric Reynolds and the Canadian cartoonists Alex Fellows, whose Canvas shows the influence of Ed, and Bryan Lee O'Malley, who 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.

Critic Chris Lanier placed Ed in a tradition that included Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Max Andersson's Pixy, and Eric Drooker's Flood!; he wrote that symbols appear with such frequency and importance in these works as to suggest significance, while remaining symbolically empty.  He finds predecessors for these works in German Dada and the Theatre of the Absurd.  Reviewer Brad McKay found Ed "both hopeless and funny, a trick moviemakers like Tim Burton and Todd Solondz wish they could pull off more regularly".

D. Aviva Rothschild likened the story to "staring at six-day-old roadkill".  Brown's father was too offended to keep reading after the fifth minicomic issue, "Ed and the Beanstalk".

In Yummy Fur #4, there was a scene in which a fictional "Saint Justin" masturbates after putting off his wife's advances.  In one panel "Saint Justin" had just ejaculated all over his hand, his penis in full view and his semen-covered hand clearly visible behind it.  Vortex publisher Bill Marks had the panel covered up with another illustration after discussing it with Brown.  Brown agreed to this censorship, but was "annoyed" by it.  Marks later called it a mistake that he would not make again, and when Brown included a scene in the following issue of the Ronald Reagan penishead vomiting Marks made no objection, and all future collections of Ed have the original uncensored panel.  The censored portion of the panel was covered with a note delivered by a rabbit that Brown often used as a surrogate self; the message read:   Brown has said that perhaps 100 to 200 readers sent requests for the uncensored panel.

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 banned from any stores, but Diamond, the largest American comics distributor, stopped carrying it for a time in 1988.  A publisher discovered that boxes of its feminist publication were lined with discarded pages of Yummy Fur, included pages in which Chet stabs Josie while having sex with her.  The publisher lodged a complaint with the Ontario-based printer, which informed Vortex it would no longer handle Yummy Fur.  The third issue of the Drawn & Quarterly Ed series was seized at the Canadian border, but was later deemed admissible.

Critic R. Fiore initially found the 1992 ending disappointing, but changed his mind 2012, saying the sad ending gave Ed "an emotional punch that it wouldn't otherwise have".  Cartoonists such as Craig Thompson at first found the story off-putting, but later came to admire it.  Critic Douglas Wolk wrote that it is not surprising that Brown had not settled on one conclusion to the story, as that "would mean some kind of narrative closure", while Eds premise is that "everything makes sense as a big picture eventually, but nothing can be relied on from moment to moment".

In 2014, Uncivilized Books published Ed Vs. Yummy Fur Brian Evenson.  The book details the differences between the various versions of the Ed narrative.

Awards

Other media

Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991 to adapt Ed to film, for which he has planned to use Yummy Fur as the title.  Such a film could use stop-motion animation, but the project has yet to get off the ground.  At one point McDonald hoped to have Macaulay Culkin star as Ed, Rip Torn as Ronald Reagan and Drew Barrymore as Nancy Reagan.  In 2000, it was reported that the movie would have a budget of $6,000,000, but it was unable to get the financial backing.  A script was written by Don McKellar, and later with John Frizzell.

In 2007, the City of Toronto government commissioned Brown to create six weeks' worth of new episodes of the strip as part of their Live with Culture campaign. The strips were published in Now magazine. In one episode a zombie and his human girlfriend attend a screening of McDonald's still-unmade adaptation of Ed.  The same year, McDonald placed Brown's graphic novel in scenes in his film The Tracey Fragments.

See also

Canadian comicsComic Book ConfidentialSurreal humour

Notes

References

Works cited

Books

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Journals and magazines

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Other sources

 
 
 
 
 
 
 Brown, Chester.  Ed the Happy Clown''.  Drawn & Quarterly.  Nine issues (February 2005 – September 2006)(notes pages unnumbered; pages counted from first page of notes)

External links

Drawn & Quarterly titles
Harvey Award winners for Best Graphic Album
Books by Chester Brown
Comics by Chester Brown
1989 graphic novels
1992 graphic novels
2012 graphic novels
Comics controversies
Obscenity controversies in comics
Canadian comics characters
Fictional clowns
Fictional Canadian people
Cultural depictions of Ronald Reagan