Isn't It Awful About Ed?

Part One: Creating ED Instead of Learning.

Back in high school, I and my cartooning friends used to hand sketches back in forth in class. For a while, these sketches were concepts for ridiculous and usually insanely violent super heroes. My main partners in crime were John (Swamp Thing, Miracleman) Totleben and Mark (Duplex Planet, New Yorker) Weber. The drill was pretty simple; one person wrote & pencilled, another "inked", and the goal was to create the most laughable concept of all. This led to such memorable but unpublished characters as Killer Bunny and The Emulsifier (whose super power was to turn criminals into a milk-like substance).

This was also the birthplace for Ed The Grocer, which helps explain why in the early strips Ed tortures a little boy named Johnny Totleben after running over a kid named Mark. The First Ed story appeared in my mini-comic Unlikely Adventures; a few years later an opportunity to have it published in a large format led me to redraw the pencils in lurid detail. However, another opportunity beckoned the scheduled inker and he disappeared without ever so much as passing a dry brush near Ed. The strip sat in my archives untouched for six years, until I ended up finishing it myself for the Crazy Bob comic books.

Part Two: Another One Note Joke?

Like Bob, I'd been saying for awhile that Ed was too narrow a concept to go much further than 8 pages. The original story had been conceived as a one-shot, and since that strip ends with Ed dragging the corpse of a child through the city streets, it seemed any sequel would involve a brief trial and execution. But by the time I finally inked it, I thought I could squeeze a few more pages out of the idea. I did, but the second strip ends with a note that "further adventures are unlikely".

What a sap I am. Not too much later I did a complete about-face and conceived of an Ed mini-series that has yet to be published. The proposal has been shopped around and received enthusiastic reactions followed by sentences like "but there's no way to market this". I want very dearly to complete the stories, but won't take the self-publishing route and my experiences with small (garage) publishers has been brutal. So until a qualified publisher makes an offer, the Ed mini-series is but a dream.

 

Ed in the comics

ED that never was

READ the first episode of ED the GROCER! Click HERE!