Ed the Happy Clown

Chester William David Brown (born May 16, 1960) is a Canadian cartoonist and, since 2008, the Libertarian Party of Canada's candidate for the riding of Trinity—Spadina in Toronto, Canada. Brown has gone through several periods in his comics work. In the 1980s, he gained notice in alternative comics circles for the improvised, surreal, scatological Ed the Happy Clown. He followed this with revealing, confessional autobiographical comics in the early 1990s. His historical-biographical graphic novel of rebel Métis leader Louis Riel was a surprise mainstream success in the early 2000s. In 2011, he released his controversial pro-prostitution polemic, Paying for It. His underground work was initially self-published as a minicomic called Yummy Fur. Yummy Fur was picked up by the Toronto-based independent comics publisher Vortex Comics in 1986, and became a regular black-and-white comic book. The content tended towards controversial themes, which caused it to be dropped from a distributor and a printer, and held up at the Canadian border. Since 1991, most of his output has been published by the Montreal-based Drawn and Quarterly. As of the publication of Paying for It, he has given up on serializing his work to publish directly as graphic novels. He has received grants from the Canadian government to complete his work on Louis Riel and Paying for It. Especially in the 1990s, Brown was strongly associated with fellow Toronto cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, and the autobiographical comics trend during that period. The three have often depicted one another in their comics, done comics and minicomics together, and appeared in interviews together.