I've decided to post about some of the things I like to read, watch, look at and listen to. I think I've been worrying about always making sure that I've got one of my own drawings as the first post on the page most of the time. That's stupid. There are too many other things that can be talked about.
A good place to begin is with the first two volumes of Moomin, The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip published by Drawn & Quarterly. Each contains a bunch of the English-language Moomin comics by Tove Jansson first published in the 1950s. Here's a full page from book 1, where Moomintroll and his adopted brother, Sniff (who's a greedy bugger), try to deal with a bunch of unwanted guests:
As an 80s child, my first introduction to The Moomins was through the Japanese-Finnish cartoon that aired in the early 90s. The series is apparently not so faithful to the original books and unpopular amongst die-hard Moonin fans. As a kid I thought it was really cool and even after being mangled by TV, the world and characters still seemed really interesting and well developed.
The comic is straight-up fantastic though. It's playful, beautiful, tragic and fairly dark. The characters are all genius especially Moomintroll. He makes a great lead. As the blurb on the back says, he's got something of the Charlie Brown in him. When's that ever been a bad thing? Never that's when. He's totally all over the shop, a coward one minute, a hero the next. Always crying and shouting and sulking and laughing.
I don't think Schultz ever had Charlie Brown get so depressed as to be suicidal though. Have a click about where you can. Buy some books and stuff. There are some great clips from the spooky fuzzy-felt 70s animated series hovering around online. Infact, I'm sure you can get it on DVD.
UPDATE: The full set of Moomin books drawn by Tove Jansson are out and available on Amazon: Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, Book 4, Book 5. From book 6 onwards, the collected comics are drawn by Tove's brother, Lars.
