Moomin Comic Strips

Moomin Comic Strips

Moomin (swe. Mumin or Mumintrollen; fin. Muumipeikko) is a comic strip created by Tove Jansson, and followed up by Lars Jansson, featuring their Moomin family of characters.

The first comic strip, entitled Mumintrollet och jordens undergång (Moomintroll and The End of The World) was a short-lived project for the children's section of the Finland-Swedish leftist newspaper Ny Tid. It was written between 1947 and 1948, at the request of the editor, a friend of Jansson's, Atos Wirtanen. The series was published with two new strips weekly, and was mainly an adaptation of Comet in Moominland. The series has been reprinted in book form under the name Jorden går under (The World is Ending) by the newspaper.

The main series of Moomin comic strips were made directly for the British market: they were spread by the British Associated Newspapers comic strip syndicate and the original publisher was the Evening News newspaper. The series originally appeared in newspapers from 1954–1975. At its peak, Moomin appeared in over 40 countries and about 120 papers, with over 20 million readers daily, making it the most successful Finnish comic strip ever published. Tove and Lars Jansson received the Finnish Comic Strip Association's "Puupää-hattu" award in 1980.

In the 1990s, a comic book version of Moomin was produced in Scandinavia after Dennis Livson and Lars Jansson's Moomin animated series was shown on television. The Janssons had no involvement in these comic books. However in the wake of the comic books success, two new Moomin comic strips were launched under the artistic and content oversight of Lars and his daughter, Sophia Jansson-Zambra. Sophia now provides sole oversight for the strips.