Hallelujah!
Finally. Ed the Happy Clownis back in print in book form for the first time in
decades. This is the ground breaking work that both put Chester
Brown on the map and broadened the horizons of comics in the 1980s,
causing a seismic shift in its landscape and charting a new direction
away from heroic fantasy through a methodology that, in hindsight, can
be seen to be – at least in some respects – a deconstruction of the
psychological as well as epistemological underpinnings of that genre,
which has since become dominated by corporate entertainment behemoths;
which makes sense when considering that Chester was briefly in their
thrall to the point of actually trying
to work for DC and Marvel. Superhero comics (at least of
those of Chester's youth) encode identities wed to idealistic
self-images that ask the reader to deny the coporeal, animal aspects of
human being, to split them off and
project them onto others – the evil villians – which are then to be
overcome by the hero, which, while often temporarily defeated and
subdued, eternally recur in the same or new form. These aspects
of being cannot be effectively banished for the simple reason that they
are part of the human, and their splitting off can never be
successfully maintained in this life. In Ed the Happy Clown – which, (quite)
significantly was often paired with a back-up feature adapting New
Testament Gospel; Mark, followed by Matthew – these aspects are
reintegrated back into comics identity with a vengeance.
This epic saga
of self-discovery that was simultaneously a saga of
self-annihilation originally ran in Chester's flagship title, Yummy Fur. Beginning life as
a self-published mini-comic that lasted seven issues, it went on to run
for 32 issues. Yummy Fur was a classic
auteurist single-artist comic book series, written and drawn by a natural cartoonist, that was –
along with Love and Rocketsand Neat Stuff, and later Eightball, Hate, Dirty Plotte and Palookaville – one of the few essential comic book titles of its
day. The first 24 issues were published by the now defunct Vortex
Comics, before moving to Drawn and Quarterly, which has remained
Chester's publisher ever since.
Chester went on
a journey to the center of his mind and found the secret hideout of his
super ego, whereupon he burst in, knocked it out, tied it to a chair
and then put a strip of duct tape over its mouth. Then he took
its keys and let out all his own thoughts, impulses, drives and urges
that the super ego had kept locked up since adolescence and let them
run amok for eighteen consecutive issues of Yummy Fur. The end result is Ed the Happy Clown. Not for the faint of heart, it is a steaming scatological
cauldron into which Chester poured the contaminants of his soul. Prepare yourself for a series of free
flowing associations like none other, where "Ronald Reagan" is
reincarnated as a talking penis, where a vampiric succubus is brutally
stabbed during sex by her partner, where shit pours out of one
dimension into another through an unsuspecting anus, and much much
more.
It bears noting
that Edis is best approached as a surrealist work. Surrealism began as a
literary movement, devoted to automatic writing – a writing that works
to channel the unconscious id straight onto the page, unfettered
by
the controlling ego, and this was precisely the spirit in which Edwas created. Comics are arguably the superior form in which to
employ
the surrealist method. Comics can move straight through the
visual
cortex while simultaneously connecting to the language centers in the
brain, allowing a unique combination of neural firing that assists in
short-circuiting the super-ego. There is certainly a precedent to Edin R. Crumb's late 60s work, and the surrealist vein continues to be
successfully mined today by artists as diverse as Christopher Forgues
(C.F.) and Chester's fellow
Canadians, Marc Bell and Michael DeForge, yet it remains the yardstick
by which all others are measured.
Previously
published by Vortex in two different editions, both incomplete in
different ways, and the second of
which came out twenty years ago, Ed the Happy Clownis at last given
the Drawn and Quarterly treatment in this definitive – at least for
now; you never know for sure with Chester, who was, at one point, at
work redrawing the entire work – edition, that is promised to arrive
with a new foreword by the author and an extensive notes section
(presumably also by the author and taken from the nine issue series
released by D & Q in 2005).
retail price - $24.95
copacetic price -
$22.22
