Ed The Happy Clown - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

Ed was not a book for the squeamish, and was vilified by women's rights groups, as well as being off-putting to fellow cartoonists (some of whom, including Craig Thompson, later came to admire it). D. Aviva Rothschild, author of Graphic Novels: a Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics, found the story akin to "staring at six-day-old roadkill". Even Brown's father was too offended to keep reading after the fifth minicomic issue, "Ed and the Beanstalk".

However, the book was praised by numerous publications, from The Comics Journal to mainstream publications like The Rolling Stone, which placed Ed on an early-1990s "Hot" list, and The Village Voice. Time placed Ed at #7 on their list of "All Time top ten graphic novels", Fantagraphics editor/critic/co-publisher Kim Thompson placed Ed at #27 on his top 100 comics of the 20th Century, and former Comics Journal editor and Comics Reporter blogger Tom Spurgeon called Ed "one of the three best alt-comix serials of all time". It also appeared in Gene Kannenberg's 500 Essential Graphic Novels (2008).

Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics Journal, placed Ed in a tradition that included Daniel 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.

Comics 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". Douglas Wolk wrote that it is not surprising that Brown will not settle on one conclusion to the story, as that "would mean some kind of narrative closure", while Ed's premise is that "everything makes sense as a big picture eventually, but nothing can be relied on from moment to moment".

Ed had a large impact on a number of Brown's contemporaries, including fellow Canadians Dave Sim and Seth, who was taken in by the ambitiousness of Brown's storytelling—"hose 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 Brown's 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 Doug Wright Award-winning Canvas shows the influence of Ed, and Bryan Lee O’Malley, the latter of whom 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.