I found Bruno in the first semester of my business school program, about a month into my first serious depression, during which I was confronting all my deepest fears about having uprooted my life and put myself into debt. It was good to find Bruno and realize that all the suffering had happened, much more definitively, before.
This was about six or seven years ago, a little over a third of the way through her absolutely ingenious run, during which she railed against the dying of the light, the conventional discomforts of life, and went through to reinvent everything in her life from first principles. Her end today has me feeling bittersweet. Yes, she appears to have finally accepted that she is worthy of happiness, that the love of her friends can be accepted without guilt, that life is sweet amidst the bitterness.
Or, as only Bruno could say, after her distant inamorata of many years proposes finding a place to live together,
Because, really, that’s the only way to get through life.
I couldn’t be happier to have been able to be a patron to Chris during the latter years of the strip. I also couldn’t be happier that he will focus his energies going forward on Little Dee, which already has some of the loony greatness of Pogo about it. Can you imagine a world where Chris Baldwin is in your morning paper? I for one can’t imagine a world without his work. As sad as I am to bid farewell to Bruno’s story, I look forward to the next chapter from Chris with eagerness.