And here’s the one you’ve been waiting for: Moomin hits Britain, and all those fascinating preliminary sketches.
Here’s part two of my article on Tove Jansson and the genesis of the Moomins, appearing in the Cartoon Club of Great Britain’s monthly magazine, The Jester.
I’ve just recently contributed an article on Tove and the history of the Moomins to The Jester, the monthly magazine of the Cartoon Club of Great Britain. It’s only available to members, but I’m sharing the article here… read on for some previously unseen and untransalted Tove Jansson material.
Following in her mother’s footsteps, Tove Jansson started contributing work to a magazine called Garm in 1929. Named for the eponymous hound that guarded the gates of Hell, this Finnish equivalent of Private Eye dripped with satire, political and otherwise.
By the early 1940’s, Tove was Garm’s main illustrator – by the time of the magazine’s closure in 1953, she would have contributed over 500 cartoons, covers, frontispieces and caricatures. In fact, from 1943 onwards, virtually every single cover – often in full colour – was crafted by Tove Jansson. In Garm, she found the elbow room to experiment and develop her style. Some of her pictures reflected her earliest work as a teenager, others incorporated the signature strokes and crosshatching that would feature later in the Moomin strips.
Ah yes, Moomin. From roughly the same time, Tove Jansson started signing her work with a little character named Snork, who would become increasingly familiar in the years to come. Snork featured at least somewhere in every issue and on virtually every cover – sometimes in the background, often as an active participant in the illustration.
He wasn’t the only familiar face. Thingummy and Bob made their debut on the front page of Garm before Finn Family Moomintroll was printed, and even Prickina and Fabian from – Tove’s first published strip – had the occasional cameo.
In the course of my research, I found some gems from the archives, which I’ll share over the next few posts. With apologies for the quality, indulge yourself in a game of Hunt The Snork…
Perhaps one of the saddest things about the recent surge of interest in Tove Jansson’s paintings is that it came a little too late. All through her life she had craved recognition as an artist, but her work was inevitably overshadowed by the immense success of the Moomins. “Those damn Moomins,” she once remarked. “I don’t want to hear about them any more. I could vomit on the Moomintrolls”.
Her frustration was understandable. Even in her early teens her work had been featured in magazines and in her time as the in-house illustrator for Garm, Finland’s political satire magazine, she contributed over six hundred covers, cartoons, and illustrations.
In 1947, she was commissioned to create two large frescos for Helsinki City Hall: Party in the City and Party in the Countryside, both of which may now be seen in all their glory in the permanent Tove Jansson exhibit at HAM in Helsinki. Much can be read into the pictures; in Party in the City, Tove sits alone at a table whilst her lover is being wooed. But Moomin is there, hidden in plain sight to provide moral support. It wasn’t the first time her signature troll sneaked into a picture and it wouldn’t be the last.