It started in an era when comic books and their characters were generally considered to be ongoing, and finished when the self-contained stories of the graphic novel had begun to come into prominence.

Yummy Fur quickly gained a reputation for taboo-breaking—Ed the Happy Clown's plot revolved around a character who could not stop defecating, and whose anus was a gateway to another dimension; then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan's head attached to the end of the protagonist's penis; and a beautiful female vampire, who is out to get revenge on the boyfriend who murdered her, and who usually appears entirely naked.

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 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.

After completing Ed, Brown moved on to a series of personally revealing autobiographical stories, starting with "Helder" in Yummy Fur #19.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.