Yummy Fur (comics)

The story that first drew attention for Brown's work—a surreal, scatological tale of dark humour. The story was improvised for the most part, and grew out of a number of completely unrelated short comics that appeared in the earliest issues of Yummy Fur. The story follows the large-headed, childlike Ed, a children's clown, who, after being submerged in the faeces of a man who can't stop defecating, finds the head of his penis has been replaced with the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan.

The story makes use of a wide variety of media and comic-book tropes and clichés,[4] such as vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster, aliens, alternative dimensions and cannibal pygmies, as well as a lot of dark religious imagery and potentially offensive imagery—nudity, sex, graphic violence and body horror.

Ed was intended to be a character Brown would use throughout his career, but after the first dozen issues, he grew dissatisfied with the direction the story had taken, and also wanted to change his drawing style. Inspired by the autobiographical comics of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt,[2] Brown decided to bring the Ed story to an end in issue #18 of Yummy Fur and spent the next few years focusing on revealing autobiographical stories.

Brown's straight-faced cartoon adaptations of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, started as Brown, who had been raised in a strictly Baptist household, tried to find out for himself what Christ was all about, and what he really believed. The Gospel of Mark began in the fourth issue of the Vortex series, which was the first issue of new material. The Gospel of Matthew started in issue #15 of Yummy Fur and continued in most issues through the end of the series, and in all but the first issue of Underwater. Matthew is unfinished and has not continued since 1997.

After completing Ed, Brown moved on to a series of personally revealing autobiographical stories, starting with "Helder" in Yummy Fur #19. The drawing style, done with a brush, became more and more sparse in an attempt to move away from the style of Ed the Happy Clown, which Brown had grown uncomfortable with. Most of the shorter stories, like "Helder", "Showing Helder" and "Danny's Story", took place not long before they were written, but the longer graphic novels took place mostly in Brown's adolescence in the 1970s.

Narrated by a winged, not-so-angelic version of himself, the story details Brown's experiences as an adolescent obsessed with the Playmates in Playboy magazine, while wracked with guilt over his obsessive masturbation, and later his difficulty relating to women as an adult. The story is the source of some controversy, as it graphically depicted a minor masturbating and ejaculating and was also seen by some women to defend pornography.

The story appeared in issues #21–23 of Yummy Fur and was originally titled Disgust and later The Playboy Stories. The story was collected in 1992 under the title The Playboy.

Another tale of Brown's adolescence. Brown has trouble relating with the opposite sex, even when they are the ones trying to connect with him. He is an awkward teenager who never swears, which is picked up by some of the other boys in his school, who constantly pick on him and try to get him to swear.

The story also depicts the final days of Brown's mother when he was 17. Brown is a difficult son, and has trouble expressing his affection for her. She has schizophrenia and dies in the hospital after falling down the stairs.

Originally titled Fuck, the story was retitled I Never Liked You when collected.

Brown self-published seven issues of the Yummy Fur minicomic

In the early 1980s, Brown had been trying unsuccessfully to get his work published by publishers such as Raw, Fantagraphics Books and Last Gasp. He was convinced by his then-girlfriend, Kris Nakamura, to take the work he had piled up and publish them himself as photocopied minicomics, distributing them on the streets of Toronto. Sales got off to a slow start, but eventually picked up. "Sales were brisk", with some issues topping 1000 copies,[5] as Brown sold the books on consignment in bookstores, local comic shops, and through mail order,[6] while working a day job in a photography shop. Brown published the series under the "Tortured Canoe" imprint.

Brown had pitched his work to Vortex Comics publisher Bill Marks before 1986, but at the time, Marks was not prepared to publish an ongoing series. In 1986, at the urging of Mister X artist Seth, Marks finally contacted Brown with a contract to publish three issues, which would reprint the entire contents of the seven issue minicomic series. The contract would be renewed depending on sales. The December 1986 first issue received preorders of 12,000 copies, a considerable number for a small-press, black-and-white comic book. The large number of orders was due in part to the black-and-white comics explosion of the mid-1980s, spearheaded by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's breakout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The boom soon imploded, however, and Yummy Fur's sales dropped to a few thousand.

The book was dropped by a printer in the province of Ontario after the printer had used discarded pages of the fourth issue of Yummy Fur to pack boxes of a feminist publication. The issue included a nude scene from the Ed the Happy Clown serial in which the character, Chet, stabs his girlfriend, Josie, while they had sex. The feminist publisher lodged a complaint, and the printer informed Vortex that they would not handle Yummy Fur anymore.[7][8] In 1989, the bindery Packaging Services & Supplies of Wisconisin refused to bind the first Yummy Fur collection and an Omaha the Cat Dancer collection, citing that employees found the content offensive; a spokesman for the company called them "worse than pornography".[9]

Sales saw their lowest point with issue #9, at 1673 copies, largely due to the fact that Diamond Comic Distributors had dropped the book[10]—purportedly for low sales, despite the fact that Yummy Fur had been getting more orders than many other Vortex titles that hadn't been dropped. It was suspected that the book had actually been dropped due to its potentially offensive content. The Comics Journal had begun to investigate the incident, but a few issues later, Diamond started including Yummy Fur in its catalogue again, and sales started to rise, eventually reaching 7000 copies per issue.[11]

Drawn & Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros had been courting Brown for his newly established Montréal-based company, but Brown was comfortable where he was, and felt loyalty to Bill Marks for giving him his big break. While Marks had a poor reputation for his treatment of other cartoonists, Brown felt that he had been treated well. In 1991, just as his contract with Vortex had come up, Oliveros offered Brown an enticing deal—a 25% royalty, as compared to 13% at Vortex. That, combined with the fact that Julie Doucet and Seth[12] had jumped aboard Oliveros' ship, convinced Brown join Drawn & Quarterly, starting with the 25th issue of Yummy Fur.

Brown did not want to leave Marks up the creek, and so allowed Vortex to publish a second, "definitive" edition of Ed the Happy Clown in 1992, with a different ending from the one that had appeared in Yummy Fur. Drawn & Quarterly, however, published in the same year the collected version of The Playboy, which had appeared in the Vortex-published issues #21–23 of Yummy Fur, and they have continued to publish all of his work since.

Oliveros convinced Brown that the Yummy Fur title was no longer appropriate for the direction the book had taken, and Brown chose to publish his next major story, Underwater, under its own title. The last issue of Yummy Fur was #32, and was an issue-long instalment of his adaptation of the Gospel of Matthew, which would continue in the pages of Underwater.

Most issues were eight pages long, and were photocopied on sheets of 8+1⁄2" x 11" paper, folded in half and stapled together. In February 1985, Brown put out a 48-page, digest-sized compilation of the first six issues, with an extra one-page strip called "Fire with Fire".[14][15]

Brown filled up the first four issues with material that he had produced since 1980, putting out one issue per month. After the fourth issue, his backlog ran out. He had to start producing new material, and Yummy Fur's frequency dropped.

All issues had black-and-white contents printed on newsprint, with colour outer covers on heavier stock paper.

The Ed the Happy Clown storyline has been reprinted in a number of formats since: a 1989 book collecting material from the first 12 issues of Yummy Fur; a 1992 "Definitive Ed Book", which leaves out much of the later material and also provides a completely new ending; and a nine-issue Ed the Happy Clown series from Drawn & Quarterly with new covers, unpublished artwork and extensive commentary by Brown.

The autobiography work has been reprinted as The Playboy: A Comic Book in 1992 and I Never Liked You in 1994, with The Little Man: Short Strips 1980–1995 collecting the remainder, along with other miscellaneous short works from other sources.

Brown decided not to reprint the early Yummy Fur stories which had borrowed from other works. The Gospel adaptations also remain unfinished and uncollected.

Joseph Witek wrote of the difficulties Yummy Fur presented—in the context of the "high art/low art" split in alternative comics in the 1980s, best represented by division of visions in Art Spiegelman's Raw and Robert Crumb's Weirdo, the combination of Brown's grotesque adventures in Ed the Happy Clown and the straight renditions of the Gospels seem to straddle this line.[17]

Chris Lanier, writing in The Comics Journal, placed Ed the Happy Clown in a tradition that included Dan 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.[18] He finds predecessors for these works in German Dada[19] and the Theatre of the Absurd.[20]

The following are awards or nominations for Yummy Fur or collections of work that first appeared in it: