Moomin — eccentric comic masterpiece from a legendary children’s author

I say the print books are well worth reading even for adults, and get progressively darker as they go along. The last one, Moominvalley in November, is downright bleak at times.

Lovely to see Moomin (or as we call them, Muumit) and Tove Jansson, our national treasure, being celebrated here. :smile: Since the last year was the 100th anniversary of her birth, her life and works have been in the media frequently. She is well-known for having had a female life-partner who inspired a character in the Moomin series, and who she collaborated with together and filmed two documentaries about their later life (one about living their summers on an island and one about travelling the world - I watched them recently) Tove Jansson spoke for diversity and led a very natural, bohemian life, so she’s a great role model.

I love everything Moomin. The original books are great, and even though they are technically children’s literature, they can certainly be enjoyed by adults as well. The fifth book, called Moominland Midwinter (Taikatalvi in Finnish, which literally means Magic Winter but the just name sounds really beautiful in Finnish), is especially more introspective and deals with heavier themes.

The picture books I personally enjoy immensely, because Tove Jansson drew the art herself and it is just beautiful. See @SamSam’s pictures above from “The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My” (Which has the much better title of “Kuinkas sitten kävikään?” in Finnish, lit. “What happened next then?”), which has some of the best and craziest illustrations:

“Who Will Comfort Tuffle?” is another great one. It’s about loneliness.

Then there are the the comics, which can be… well, I’ll let the comics themselves do the talking:


Then there was the Polish stop motion animation series and of course the 90s “anime” (weird to call it that, even if it is correct, since it was a Japanese/Dutch/Finnish production) series and related movies. There were two more Japanese anime series before that, but they were never shown in Finland. Don’t let the light tone of the 90s series fool you, it’s very well made and mostly shares the same stories as the books. Some parts also scared the crap out of me as a kid, like the character of Mörkö (or Groke):

There’s even a Moominland in Naantali (not even an hour’s drive away from where I live) and a Moomin museum in Tampere, which gets a lot of Japanese visitors. Moomin is big in Japan.

Also, as a random extra fact, did you know Tove Jansson illustrated the very first Finnish edition of the Hobbit?

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I own the entire set. I wish I didn’t.

I love Jansson’s work. I grew up on the Russian translations of the Moomin books. I re-read the English translations years later (Swedish text being beyond my abilities, alas). When I saw these books, I jumped at the chance to buy them after just a cursory glance; I knew how amazing a storytelling Jansson was, how could I possibly miss the chance to introduce my daughter to the Moomins?

Except these are the comics, not the books. And they make no sense. I don’t know if it’s the quality of the translation, something I just don’t get about Scandinavian humour, or me just getting old, but the conversation is stuttering, the jokes don’t line up with the punchlines (when there is a punchline at all), and I can’t empathise with the characters. The books were magical. They still are. The strips… not so much.

I was introduced to the Moomin books by a Swedish friend…she’s fluent in English and thought the English translations wet quite good.

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No one ever said Usenet could spell.

But can you fish?

driving trollies can be phonetically confused with trawling, a different method of fishing where a net (trawl) is drawn through the water instead of lines.

The strips strike me strongly as Scandinavian humor, but also as being for adults. They were for a paper. More dry humor and Freud, less magic. But I like them! They’re just a different experience.

Alas, that image link isn’t coming through for me. Those books look wonderful: the ones I read as a child were more sparsely illustrated.

So…were the Moomintrolls written first in Swedish or Finnish?

I’ve read Moomin; it has an irregular orbit.

Swedish first. Jansson was born in Finland, but part of a Swedish-speaking minority.

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Yeah, I loved the '90s cartoon even though it was aimed at a younger audience than me. Very pretty animation.

No Tintin, no Moomin. America is weird.

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Rightclick, open image in new tab. (At least in Chrome.) Opens an image in Finnish wikipedia with the book cover, titled “Lohikaarmevuori” (“Dragon Mountain”).

(The trick is to click on the image in the medaviewer, so it shows without the javascript interface, then it embeds here without a hitch.)

Apparantly Disney tried to buy Moomins three times. First time was in the 50s then in 70s and the last time they tried was in the 00s when they wanted to buy all of it.


2 strips from Moomin in Torrelorca where they are trying to buy some marihuana but end up with LBJ pills instead. Not to be mixed up with:

Thanks to @daneel for saving me the bother of writing a correction. It’s often wise not to be too quick on the draw, especially when trying to correct someone.

Is there anybody else who wants to keep digging this hole of people who don’t know the difference between net fishing and line fishing?

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I failed there, thanks for the save @shaddack.

The original books are indeed sparsely illustrated (in black-and-white), but the picture books are bigger with colourful illustrations and completely different stories, with some characters who don’t appear in any other Moomin works (like the poor, lonely Toffle). If I wanted to get a kid introduced to Moomin, I’d get them one of the picture books first.

I think the comics are one of the less popular forms of Moomin here in Finland, or at least that’s my personal impression. Not that they’re not also very good, they just have a bit of a different feel. Also, though we tend to pretend otherwise, Finland is not technically a part of Scandinavia, so… :wink: Let’s call it Nordic.

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Are you trying to trick me into thinking that Finland is a country?

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Absolutely!

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