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 to 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.