The story is a dark, humorous mix of genres and features scatological humour, sex, body horror, extreme graphic violence, and blasphemous religious imagery.

The surreal, largely improvised story began with a series of unrelated short strips that Brown went on to tie into a single narrative.

Shortly after, Brown became unsatisfied with the direction of the serial; he brought it to an abrupt end in the eighteenth issue of Yummy Fur and turned to autobiography.

It has left an influence on contemporary alternative cartoonists such as Daniel Clowes, Seth, and Dave Sim, and has won a Harvey and other awards.

Ed's adventures featured encounters with penis-worshipping pygmies, flesh-eating rats, Martians, Frankenstein's monster, and other characters from traditional genre fiction.

After the operation, Mounties raid the hospital and, finding Reagan, take Backman and leave Ed, who has had a larger penis sewn on in the President's place.

They are at first innocuous and unimportant: a zombie named Christian, another character who believes he has found Christ's face on a piece of adhesive tape.

With the fourth issue of Yummy Fur, Brown's surreal take on Christianity becomes central: the cover depicts the Virgin Mary holding not just the infant Christ, but also a severed hand.

Within is the story of Saint Justin, whose amputation becomes a key motif: Chet loses his own hand and finds another; his own appears mysteriously under Ed's pillow.

[16] Despite Saint Justin's story's exposure to the reader as a fraud, Chet's faith in the official version restores his severed hand.

[23] Yummy Fur readers also found "I Live in the Bottomless Pit", a short strip in which a man discovers the Antichrist, who after millennia underground has forgotten his mission—a paradoxical one, as he states his orders were from God.

[16] Ed prominently features transgressive content including nudity, graphic violence, racist imagery, blasphemy, and profanity.

[b][26] Imagery such as the recurring Pygmy characters and their "ooga booga" language, Chris Lanier asserted, reinforce "old colonial imaging of 'third world natives'".

He continued to mature as an artist and draughtsman throughout the run of Ed,[8] showing enormous growth from the beginning to end of the graphic novel.

He found that the improvisational method did not work well with Underwater in the 1990s; after cancelling that series he turned to carefully scripting out his stories, beginning with Louis Riel.

[33] Since graduating from high school, Brown had been inching towards underground comix, starting with the work of Richard Corben and especially Moebius in Heavy Metal, and eventually getting over his disgust over Robert Crumb's sex-laden comics to become a huge fan of the Zap and Weirdo artist.

The work was rejected from these publishers for one reason or another, and Brown was eventually convinced by his friend Kris Nakamura, who was active in the Toronto small press scene, to take it and self-publish it.

In the late 1980s he came to feel restricted by the character;[38] inspired by the revealing autobiographical work of Julie Doucet and Joe Matt and the simple cartooning of fellow Toronto cartoonist Seth, Brown turned to autobiography.

[37] The first collection, Ed the Happy Clown: A Yummy Fur Book, appeared in 1989 from Vortex Comics before Brown decided to end the story.

It collects the Ed stories up to the twelfth issue of Yummy Fur and includes a cartoon foreword scripted by Harvey Pekar and drawn by Brown.

Brian Evenson sees this as a Brown-like eccentricity and a gesture emphasizing the equal importance Brown places on both word and image.

The artwork was smallest in the 2012 Drawn & Quarterly edition, a size Brown considered ideal, stating, "The smaller the better, as long as the words are still legible.

[47] Ed was seen by many critics a high point of the early alternative comics scene in the 1980s, echoes of which can be seen in such later surrealistic graphics novels as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes and Black Hole by Charles Burns.

[48] The story won praise from The Comics Journal[23] and mainstream publications such as The Village Voice[49] and Rolling Stone, which placed Ed on an early-1990s "Hot" list.

[53] Ed had a large impact on a number of Brown's contemporaries, including fellow Canadians Dave Sim and Seth, the latter of whom was taken in by the ambitiousness of Brown's storytelling, saying "Those brilliant sequences where he would show a situation and then return to it later from a different perspective, like the death of Josie, really blew me away"[6]—and Dave Cooper, who called Ed "the most perfect book ever".

[58] Critic Chris Lanier placed Ed in a tradition that included Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Max Andersson's Pixy, and Eric Drooker's Flood!

[27] Reviewer Brad McKay found Ed "both hopeless and funny, a trick moviemakers like Tim Burton and Todd Solondz wish they could pull off more regularly".

[65] It is not known if Ed or Yummy Fur were banned from any stores, but Diamond, the largest American comics distributor, stopped carrying it for a time in 1988.

[69] Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald has had the rights since 1991[6] to adapt Ed to film, for which he has planned to use Yummy Fur as the title.

[73] In 2007, the City of Toronto government commissioned Brown to create six weeks' worth of new episodes of the strip as part of their Live with Culture campaign.