Title: Moomin Adventures
Issue: Book 1
Date: 2024
Company: Drawn & Quarterly
Writer: Tove Jansson, Lars Jansson
Artist: Tove Jansson, Lars Jansson
This volume collects the Moomin newspaper strip, which was primarily published in the London Evening News. The comics presented in this volume are mostly from the mid-1950s.
The Moomins are a family of trolls, resembling cartoon hippos, created by Finnish author Tove Jansson. Her brother, Lars Jansson, eventually joined the team to assist with the comic strip and took over the work on it in the 1970s.
Most of the stories here are of the "fish-out-of-water" variety, with the Moomins serving to parody various aspects of society from the high-society culture of the French Riviera to classic literature to art and psychology. The humor ranges from very snarky satire to the completely absurdist.
The opening story was my favorite of this collection, with the whole Moomin family blundering through a vacation on the Riviera and going rapidly back and forth between rags and riches while being mostly oblivious to the expectations of society around them.
The Moomin parody of the classic desert island stories of Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson were also very entertaining. In the second half of this volume the comic strips begin to rely on characters outside of the core Moomin family, and I found these stories to be less approachable, although there was still plenty of sharp humor to be had.
Rating: 6/10
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