| What began in 1994 as a small side project for The UMass Collegian (his college newspaper) turned into a decade-long, labor of love for comic-artist and novelist Christopher Baldwin. Bruno, a bisexual, philosophical, free-spirited woman, is the subject of Baldwin's ongoing realistic online comic strip of the same name.
Bruno is about how one woman deals with growing up and living her life from her early twenties to her early thirties. She grapples with politics, her sexual identity, her inability to commit to anything, her tendency to sink into depression, her lovers, her friends and her family. Bruno has had relationships and one-night stands with men and women, explored polyamorous relationships, affairs with older men and women, and she's even fallen in love once or twice.
When it comes to love and sex, you could say Bruno is well-rounded. But when it comes to understanding people, she's still a babe in the woods. She is strong and stubborn, however, and always tackles life head-on, unless she can think of a good way to avoid it. She's someone that all of us have wanted to be at one point or another. She's also like that friend who exasperates you, but who you always have more fun with than any other.
When asked how he first came up with the idea for Bruno, Baldwin recalls, "She was the first female protagonist I had written, and I wished to explore that." He adds, "I also felt that comic strips were fairly barren of strong women. There was Dykes To Watch Out For and Sylvia--Sylvia was possibly my first inspiration for the strip--neither of which were very well known, and Cathy, which originally was a rather progressive strip but I feel didn't necessarily keep up with the times."
Bruno's name was inspired by "the heretic monk, Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for teaching, and is now celebrated in France as somewhat of a patron saint of free-thinkers."
The choice to make Bruno bisexual came organically, Baldwin explains, with a little bit of a push from one of his female friends. The friend joked that if Bruno were real, she'd want to sleep with her. That friend made her way into the strip as Bruno's first bisexual encounter.
Baldwin notes, "As is sometimes the case, Bruno backed away from her first bisexual experience, laughing it off as a whim almost. Since college, I've had a good number of friends who were gay, lesbian, and bisexual, so it's simply been commonplace to my life, and it felt natural to have Bruno fall in with Donna (her first serious girlfriend), and having the rest become history."
Baldwin says that integrating sexuality into Bruno's life was always important, but only in the sense that sex is such a vital part of any person's life, and he wanted to present her as a complete character. Baldwin asserts, "It is important to me to represent the different sides of Bruno's persona as a whole, not her sexual persona specifically. Me, my friends, we all have sex, we all have sexual issues, preferences, quirks. We also like eating food. So, I have strips with her eating food, and I have strips with her exploring her sexuality."
One of the things that makes Bruno so interesting is the fact that she never backs down, whether it is a discussion about politics, foreign film, or ice-cream flavors. She's so strong-willed, it's a wonder she doesn't write the strip herself. Baldwin laughs at this idea. "I would describe it more that the story's direction often doesn't go where I am trying to take it because Bruno gets stubborn. She's just such a real character to me, it doesn't feel right to ever force it, to not be true to who she is. Honestly, it is often like relating to a real person. For better more than for worse."
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