Too infrequently, I come across some incredible comic book, one I can’t believe I haven’t read--more, one I can’t believe I haven’t read and instead have been reading mainstream tripe--and I have an hour or two basking in it. Ed the Happy Clown is just one of those comic books. I can’t remember the last comic book I read as good. Ed starts off weird--Chester Brown has these little two and three page shorts, seemingly unrelated, but they lay the groundwork for the truly peculiar story. Ed’s an incredibly funny story, while Brown’s laying out all the setup and, at the beginning, the setup just seems absurd, violent, and funny. Then he wraps it all up into a cohesive province and Ed the Happy Clown starts to get real good; not just funny, but real good too.
There’s so much stuff going on in Ed--I’m not even sure I can list all of the strange characters, situations, and such--needless to say, there’s a penis with Ronald Reagan’s head on it (his talking head), so you get the idea. But Ed’s hard to talk about, like most great comic books. It doesn’t have enough “almosts” to make it a good subject (flawed, but solid work is always the best to write about), but something like Ed, which challenges the reader not to identify with it, but to luxuriate in it....
Ed the Happy Clown is not, unfortunately, perfect, however. The conclusion fails. A few things left unresolved needed resolving and, for such a crazy book, the end is too grounded. It’s tight instead of loose. Oddly, had Ed continued on (the end does not seem like an end, because it’s only the end for a couple people, not the story Brown had been working on), I think it would have gotten that looser, better ending someday. Regardless, it’s exceptional.