Chris Baldwin’s Bruno was my first great webcomic love. The eponymous Bruno was a depressive twenty-something struggling to find the plot of her life. For eleven years the strip followed its protagonist’s ups and downs, with a wordy style that gave Baldwin space to get under the skin of his introspective heroine.
But the internet moves on fast. Bruno wound up 7 years ago, and has now dropped silently down the memory-hole. I thought it was worth flagging up this appreciation of Bruno, along with the rest of Baldwin’s work:
A typical Bruno strip consists of a single long panel of characters talking over coffee, sprouting a half-dozen word balloons crammed with conversations about philosophy, sex, wine, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Beyond Bruno’s circular quest for fulfillment, there’s virtually no plot to speak of, to the point that in one sequence Bruno climbs out of the strip, demands that Baldwin make something happen, then hangs out in his apartment for several weeks. In the mid-1990s, an era of webcomics based on Star Trek and anime references, Bruno stood apart, the cutting-prone hipster in a crowd of AV club geeks.