Ed The Happy Clown - Publishing History

Publishing History

The story got its start in the second issue of Brown's original Yummy Fur minicomic, 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. After reading a set of semi-autobiographical minicomics by Julie Doucet, he quickly decided to bring the series to an end (although it would not be the only ending), and began doing autobiographical comics and changed his drawing style.

I started off wanting to do superhero stuff, and 'Ed' was very much rooted in that pulp comic book field, close to the adventure comics I was interested in doing in my late teen and early 20s. Then I gradually began losing interest in 'Ed'. Most of that stuff wasn't reprinted in 'The Definitive Ed,' I wasn't interested in it. I was coming at it from a Marvel-DC point of view where you have a character and you just keep going with that character as long as people will buy it, and at a certain point I realized you don't have to do that. You can end a story like a novel ends and go onto something else. At the beginning of 'Ed', I was totally free; I could do anything; but at the end, so many things had been blocked off and the world defined in so many ways that I wasn't as free to create, and I was bored. The night I came up with the ending, the original ending in issue 18, I was overjoyed. Wow! I get to finish this! —Chester Brown, The Comics Journal #162

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 could not "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 gospels of Mark and Matthew, which filled up the rest of the Yummy Fur issues starting with #4.

Issues of Ed the Happy Clown
#	Date
1	February	2005
2	May
3	August
4	November
5	January	2006
6	March
7	May
8	July
9	September

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 was 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 was not any better than the original.