Overview
In the early 1980s, Brown was in a creative rut until he came across a book on surrealism, 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 scatological 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 did not 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, potentially with none being definitive.
Read more about this topic: Ed The Happy Clown