Page 45 Review by Tom
This is the first in a series of six books from D&Q, and pay extra attention to Moomin's eyes. They're so expressive! Almost comedic, probably to compensate for the difficulty in expressing anything through Moomin's large, bulbous head.
Tove was a prolific if reclusive artist and novelist, spending most of her life on a small island off the coast of her native Finland with her partner. She wrote over twenty novels including a dozen children's books about her most beloved creation, the Hippo-esque Moomin family. No stranger to comics either, she found work as a political cartoonist during World War II and gained international acclaim for her depiction of Hitler as a baby crying in a nappy, surrounded by Europe's leaders trying to calm him with cake. On the icing is written, "Austria", "Poland", "Czechoslovakia" etc..
In the fifties the London Evening News approached Tove to do a daily strip of her popular Moomin series, but unlike the adaptations of the Moomin books she had previously done for a Finland-Swedish newspaper, these stories would be original tales concerning Moomin, Sniff, Mymble and Snufkin. The results are quite unlike any American newspaper strip. Huge rambling stories which must seem quite random to anyone used to the the structural six-dailies-and-a-Sunday-strip formula of PEANUTS and CALVIN & HOBBES, but not if you're a Moomin fan. Tove created a fully autonomous world with these books which, like KRAZY KAT & IGNATZ, moved entirely to its own beat. These stories often reflected upon our society and the intricacies of family politics as the young Moomin attempted, despite his families clear eccentricities, to make things run smoothly and live a simple life. These strips seem to straddle the line between the early novels' humorous adventure stories and the later books' more mature, multi-layered tales about coming of age.
The Japanese cartoon incarnation was my favourite TV fix when I was growing up and I've been hooked ever since.
