Here's another wonderful Finland creation that's new to me: the Moomin comic strips (collected and published some fifty-years later by Drawn & Quarterly--I got them from the library).
They are the work of Finnish artist-author Tove Jansson (right, 1956). Neil Gaiman calls the comic, which ran in a London newspaper starting in the mid-1950s: "A lost treasure now rediscovered--one of the sweetest, strangest comics strips ever drawn or written. A surrealist masterpiece. Honest."
Jansson wrote books about the Moomin as well as these cartoons. She based some of the residents of Moominvalley on her friends and family. Too-ticki, below, was based on her life-partner, graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä (I can't tell from Finnish names, but Tuulikki was a woman).
I'm feeling a little low today, like a wobbly hippo-thingie whose wind-up has wound-down--probably because I finished (!) the Montana movie The Disinherited yesterday---I always go into an emotional slump when I finish a project.
I may go downtown later today to the newly discovered FinnStyle store and buy myself a Moomin mug ( saw them there, and little toy Moomin figurines too!)--to dose myself with hot chocolate against this November-like weather.
"behind which the sun does not warm"
