"Was I creating a Jungian Anima in Bruno and it is now complete?"
January 1, 2007 6:43 PM   Subscribe

Christopher Baldwin's comic Bruno is ending after over 10 years. The title character has been through numerous trials: two abortions, numerous romantic encounters, a stripping career, and several close brushes with death. Bruno joins Madge's Diary, Sheppard and May, and the twisted Kim in Love as projects that never reached syndication as intended. Baldwin continues his daily comics in Little Dee, along with other experimental side projects catalogued on his main site. Not everything in his archive is SFW.
posted by mkb (13 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've been reading Bruno religiously for the last 8 years or so, and the handwriting has been on the wall for a while now. The comic has felt more than a bit aimless for a while now, starting with the whole "Bruno in a coma" saga (which went on for WAY longer than it should have), and the 2005 hiatus, followed by cutting back to 3 days per week when it returned last year.

So, I wasn't surprised to see the announcement posted last week, but it did make me a bit sad. Christopher Baldwin was one of the pioneers of the webcomic genre, and I'm sorry to see the series end.
posted by deadmessenger at 6:53 PM on January 1, 2007


Yeah, this isn't unexpected, but Bruno is very good stuff, and I will really miss it. I have to say I'm a little disappointed that he won't be killing her off, though; the tragic exit is such a staple of episodic storytelling that it feels a little like a cop-out. Plus, it seems like dying young would really fit into the Bruno story. However, Bruno has always seemed like such a personal character for Baldwin that I can understand him taking the easy way out emotionally.

$10 says she moves in with Stanley. After all, Stanley is awesome.
posted by ulotrichous at 7:22 PM on January 1, 2007


I'd rather she finds that circus again and keeps running away.
posted by mkb at 7:25 PM on January 1, 2007


As it happens, Shaenon Garrity's excellent Narbonic also ended its six-year run on New Year's Eve. Today it picked up again--she's re-running the series as a "Director's Cut," with extensive commentary on each strip and a weekly podcast. Well worth checking out; she was a master of the format before she first set pen to paper on this.

Disclaimer: I was a friend of Shaenon's in college and had a character named after me. A psychotic gerbil who was killed off almost immediately.

No, you can't touch me.
posted by Epenthesis at 7:56 PM on January 1, 2007


Damn. One of the three Internet comics I actually sent money to. Guess I should have sent more. I even bought the coffee mug, though I think it got lost in the move, or broke during the pre-move renovations. Or something. Or maybe I just haven't unpacked it yet.
posted by Orb2069 at 8:03 PM on January 1, 2007


Bummer; I remember reading Bruno years and years ago, back when GPF was funny. It has suffered in recent years, as Bruno drifted and Chris struggled for direction with the series. But even at its worst Bruno was better than most of the dramatic webcomics out there.
posted by verb at 8:10 PM on January 1, 2007


Here's to Chris! I got to buy him breakfast as he took his tour across the country just before he moved out west. Nifty guy and Bruno was a great strip.

I'm afraid I stopped reading it though once he went to the 3 day format, mostly because the site redesign made it a pain for me to get to the strips easily.
posted by ursus_comiter at 8:24 PM on January 1, 2007


I remember obsessing about bruno when i first read the metafilter post about it years ago. A little while after the coma, I started getting really REALLY tired of it. It stopped feeling like being about people and more like it was about vessels for personal whining. But maybe that was more in my reading of it than the writing. Either way, it stopped working for me, but I'm still sad to hear it's over.
posted by shmegegge at 8:33 PM on January 1, 2007


Your favorite webcomic sucks. Why anybody would think traditional syndication is a desirable, much less palatable medium for distribution is beyond me. Anytime I see a webcomic artist that pines for syndication, that's a damn good signifier that their comic will only ever go downhill.
posted by blasdelf at 10:25 PM on January 1, 2007


Dag nabit.

For what it's worth, as a native Portlander, Bruno's portrayal of Portland, Or feels greatly accurate. I always appreciated Baldwin's attention to environment. Now if I only had her cast of friends.

Count me in as one of the folks who swore that they'd catch up on the archives but never got around to it. I suck.
posted by Skwirl at 10:43 PM on January 1, 2007


blasdelf: Baldwin pretty much gave up on any hope of syndication for Bruno years ago when he created other strips specifically to pay the bills. I'm not going to knock the guy for trying to scrap a desk job so he can draw comics full-time. Well, I guess that's also a desk job.
posted by mkb at 3:39 AM on January 2, 2007


I discovered Bruno what... five years ago? And I devoured it - spending two or three whole days doing nothing but sitting in the dim, trawling through the archives. I read it for months with fascination, but gradually the fascination turned to boredom - it felt like the characters were going in circles (and this, I think, was by design), stuck in our lives-less-ordinary, when I wanted to see some staggering movement toward the light. I stopped reading a very long time ago, but I'm still so glad that Chris kept on with his project. It's a sad thing that it will be ending For Good, but also a glad thing, probably: the best stuff needs an ending.
posted by Marquis at 4:25 AM on January 2, 2007


Wow, I remember reading Bruno a long time ago. Time to catch up on the archives.
posted by mrbill at 1:00 PM on January 2, 2007


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