One hundred and twenty-two
THE BOBBINS (2013-2022) ARCHIVE IS BACK UP!
I mentioned in a prior commentary that I threw ideas into the original Bobbins then swiftly moved on. The biggest and most difficult to get around was Shelley’s boyfriend Bruno. He was depicted as a lump. I think this was “commentary” (“”commentary””) on how the girls I liked at university always seemed to have some terrible, mutated, strong beast for a lover, and that was the reason they could not recognise my abundant charms. I learned later that we all have our peccadilloes, that every special someone is answering a question of the heart, and we are immodest to think we might answer that same question. But what question of the heart did Bruno answer?
Bruno and Shelley’s relationship is obviously incongruous, born out of my youthful sour grapes, but for some reason I like going back and trying to build a castle on this soggy sand. It’s a very fun game. Bruno vanishes quite early in the 1998 Bobbins, so I had license to work out how it ended for him and Shelley, at the very least. I think the foundation stone of their relationship is, Bruno loves Shelley and Shelley loves that Bruno loves her. I think they also have a lot of physical chemistry. Which is fine when you’re 18. But by this point she has outgrown the parameters of their relationship to such an extent that it’s undignified. Once I felt sorry for poor doomed Bruno, I could keep bringing him back forever.
The sexy ghost in panel 4 is Chekhov’s Sexy Ghost, mentioned a few strips earlier.
Glad you picked this one for today. I was rereading the set and wanted to post what a good punchline the sexy ghost’s descent during Bruno’s failed proposal was.
It’s the “SEXY” sound effect that really makes it.
Thanks for the context regarding your creation of Bruno. When I originally read the strip, I never quite understood why everyone except Shelley disliked him. It felt like classism- a bunch of middle-class kids scorning a working man- which I don’t think was your intent.
I always liked Bruno quite a bit. He seemed like an earnest, dedicated guy who had found someone who genuinely liked him despite his Shrek-like aesthetic. I think there’s a real charm to a guy who understands himself and isn’t riddled with anxiety, which can be rare at that time of life. I hope that Bruno wound up somewhere nice in the Bobbinsverse and didn’t spend too long nursing his heartache.
At twenty, one may despise a bloke; at forty, one may come to understand him. It’s probably maturity or some such.
Shelley and Ryan’s poster is an act of perverse genius. The phrase “cheap, plentiful pints o’ drink” dwells with you. It stays. It promises much, and at the same time next to nothing.
In real life, Shelley Winters was an actress who had many hypermasculine men as lovers and husbands. I assumed Bruno was a caricature of the real life Shelley’s taste in men.
Same. This is equivalent to how some male models / movie stars will have a string of hyperfeminine girls (all 18-20) who, other than being enormously attractive, would never work in a long term relationship for him. He’s like a man who wakes up every morning to a smorgasbord; his eating habits have as much to do with him as his circumstances. (I’m sure most of us, if in such circumstances, would have spent a decent amount of time pursuing such things.)
Shelley was able to get what she ‘wanted’ in one particularly, uh, bodily way, but as it turned out, there’s a lot more to it than that.
Like all here I have a bit of a soft spot for Bruno, even though it was plenty obvious it was never going to work in the long run. However I think my favorite of all of Shelley’s doomed past romances is Black Metal Simon though we never got much background on that long sailed and sunken ship.