According to Chester Brown's meticulous notes, the very first panel (shown above) of Ed The Happy Clown was drawn exactly 30 years ago today, on July 13, 1982.
Ed has had a long and unusual history: it was first serialized as a mini comic; then collected into comic book form; then collected in book form in 1989; and finally collected again in book form in 1992 with a slightly different ending. After being mostly unavailable for the next 20 years, a new hardcover edition was finally published by D+Q just a couple of months ago.
And although it's a good thing that one of the seminal early works of "alternative" comics is finally back in print, I still hold out hope that those "lost" Ed stories from Yummy Fur will one day see the light of day (not likely, according to Chester). Or how about the redrawn version of Ed (about 100 pages in pencil) that Chester worked on circa 2004/2005 after completing Louis Riel? Lord knows we tried convincing Chester to make this happen (Tom almost got him to agree to it). It's right there on the list, next to our dream project of publishing Chester's Mark and Matthew gospels.
