Ed the Happy Clown

A LONG-OUT-OF-PRINT CLASIC BY A MASTER OF UNDERGROUND COMICS

In the late 1980s, the idiosyncratic Chester Brown (author of the muchlaudedPaying for ItandLouis Riel) began writing the cult classic comic book seriesYummy Fur. Within its pages, he serialized the groundbreakingEd the Happy Clown, revealing a macabre universe of parallel dimensions. Thanks to its wholly original yet disturbing story lines,Edset the stage for Brown to become a world-renowned cartoonist.

Ed the Happy Clownis a hallucinatory tale that functions simultaneously as a dark roller-coaster ride of criminal activity and a scathing condemnation of religious and political charlatanism. As the world around him devolves into madness, the eponymous Ed escapes variously from a jealous boyfriend, sewer monsters, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a janitor with a Jesus complex. Brown leaves us wondering, with every twist of the plot, just how Ed will get out of this scrape.

The intimate, tangled world ofEd the Happy Clownis definitively presented here, repackaged with a new foreword by the author and an extensive notes section, and is, like every Brown book, astonishingly perceptive about the zeitgeist of its time.