Comix Influx Blog: Moominblog

Last weekend, Ellen and I took a quick trip to visit Brussels, one of the comics capitals of Europe. We were principally there to visit friends (and their prodigious comic collection – boy, they have some good stuff on their shelves!) but of course took the opportunity to visit the Moomin exhibition at the Belgian Comic Strip Centre, and do a little comic shopping.

In deference to our own prodigious to-read (and to-translate) pile, Ellen and I only bought a couple of new books. I bought Travelling Square District By Greg Shaw, and Ellen bought Rosalie Blum Tome 3 by Camille Jourdy (skipping straight over tomes 1&2).

I really enjoyed the Moomin exhibition at the newly refurbished Belgian Comics Centre. It wasn’t a huge exhibition, but was dense with art and information.

I wasn’t brought up on the Moomin strips or novels, but I do have very fond childhood memories of the stop-frame animated adventures of the Moomins, which, I learnt from the exhibition, were made in Poland.

I knew a little of the fascinating evolution of the Moomins from seeing Moomin Memories at the ICA a few years ago, and I enjoyed seeing that story told through Jansson’s original art.

Jansson originally used a prototypical Moomintroll as almost a personal signature in her acclaimed illustration work for Garm magazine. She then started writing children’s novels around the Moomins before turning one of those into a comic for Ny Tid, a Swedish-language newspaper in Finland. In the early 1950s she started another Moomin comic, this time for the London newspaper, The Evening News. That strip ran for many years, with her brother eventually taking over the creative reins. It is these strips that are being published by Drawn and Quarterly.

Since then the adventures of the Moomins have featured in animated adventures, and there is even a Moomin World theme park in Naatali, Finland, although these had less input from Tove Jansson.

The exhibition gave a really good opportunity to dive into the world that Jansson created so convincingly. Hers was certainly a cosy, fantasy world, but she used it to gently satirise modern life, and reflect genuine, real-world concerns about 20th century life. The subtlety of her writing cannot be overstated.

However, the absolute star of the show is Jansson’s art. Delicate and absolutely precise, with a spare, regular line which still breathed all kinds of life and emotion into her strange little figures. Her colour work – demonstrated here in the numerous book covers on display – was stunningly beautiful. Wonderfully rich, bold but harmonious colours, executed again with Jansson’s absolute precision.

I walked through the exhibition being totally enchanted by one piece of art, only to turn around and find another in a different style and from a totally different period had charmed me absolutely.

The show also took the chance to show some of Jansson’s preliminary sketches for her strips. Sadly, most of her original Evening News strips were destroyed, so these were shown next to the early prints of the strips – this was facilitated as Jansson apparently (and somewhat unusually) drew at the same size as her work was published. It was interesting to see how much Jansson would change between the roughs and finished versions. Sometimes panels would be switched, sometimes the composition within a panel would be altered, a scene made more dramatic. Although this may not be the entirety of Jansson’s process, it certainly seems as if she was more worried about the pacing of the story, than getting the art just so. Despite this, the roughs still beautifully convey the emotions of her little creatures – an angry frown on Moomintroll’s face conveyed with a couple of tiny sweeps of the pencil.

The exhibition scores a coup in exhibiting, for the first time, several recently-restored reference sheets from her work on the Evening News. The Evening News strips were episodic, and formed much longer adventures. For each of these adventures, Jansson would apparently reference sheets, showing various studies of the relevant characters. These were drawn on thin paper (perhaps for light-box work?), with a thicker, brushier line than normal. As you’d expect, these sketches bustled with the life of the characters. These reference sheets were only discovered after Jansson’s death in 2001, and their purpose is uncertain. I presume Jansson created them to help her maintain a uniform look-and-feel in a serialised work, where her finished art would be sent off as it was completed.

The exhibition was curated by Paul Gravett, and you can read his captions on his website. Better yet, get down to the Belgian Comics Centre and read them there.