Vatsy and Bruno



"Would you be so kind as to submit to an interview if the alternative was being shot?"

Vatsy and Bruno, written by Adam "Rutskarn" DeCamp and hosted on the website Chocolate Hammer, is a dark humor web series whose first episode, First Ink, has recently reached completion. Each episode is to be written in serial format, with each weekly post being about three pages of text.

The eponymous characters, Vatsy and Bruno, are a pair of vaguely human animal-like creatures. Vatsy, a gaunt and emaciated feline, is a high-strung unscrupulous journalist to whom sanity, sense, and soap are things that happen to other people. Bruno, his loyal bodyguard/henchman/errand guy, is a chimp with an easygoing personality, a bone-deep stoicism, and a large-bore sawn-off shotgun. Together, they fight crime--er, search for the perfect news story.

Vatsy and Bruno is somewhat twisted, fairly dark, and ever-so-slightly absurd. Much of the humor comes from the off-kilter nature of the heroes, the strange happenings in their environment, and the constant deconstructions of tropes and stock characters in media.

Vatsy and Bruno, as well as a full-size version of the cover, can be found here.

This work of fiction provides examples of:
 * Badass Longcoat - Parodied by Trenchcoat, a monologuing one-man army who refuses to do anything in a non-hardboiled fashion.
 * Butt Monkey - Vatsy and, to an extent, Bruno as well.
 * Everything's Better With Monkeys - Or chimpanzees, as the case may be.
 * Heroic BSOD - Vatsy goes catatonic after being rejected from The Writer's Guild again.
 * Purple Prose - Committed by Vatsy, whose letters "stink of hideous purple prose [and] will forever saturate [The Writer's Guild's] desk space."
 * Sawed Off Shotgun - Wielded by Bruno. Justified in that Bruno is pretty damn strong.
 * Shout Out - To Girl Genius, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja and Anti-Heroes
 * Talking Animal - Both Vatsy and Bruno.