Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Moomin Adventures collects several years of the daily newspaper comic strip featuring Tove Jansson’s beloved Finnish family, originally produced for the London Evening News. Clever, elegant and funny from the beginning in 1954, Tove Jansson’s solo work became a family co-production when her brother Lars took over writing the scripts for Tove to draw. The strip then became the work of Lars alone when Tove departed in 1959. The dip in quality from Tove’s deft and inventive work to the proficient but pedestrian Lars is obvious when read in order through the previously published Moomin series of books, so to get around that problem this new paperback series shuffles the chronology to include stories from both Tove Jansson and Lars Jansson in each volume. This would be a sound commercial solution but mixing up the stories also mixes up Tove Jansson’s careful structure building events and connections from one strip onto the next. New readers will not notice what this means but it’s a shame to deprive them of the subtle links building the characters of the Moomins and friends story by story, and the shuffling gives an uncharacteristic, random quality to these collections that more careful sequencing could have prevented.

Moomin Adventures Book Two alternates early strips by Tove with later strips by Lars, featuring Moomin and Family Life (Tove), Moomin and the Railway (Lars), Moomin Mamma’s Maid (Tove), Moomin and the Farm (Lars), Moomin Begins a New Life (Tove), Moomin and the Scouts (Lars), Moomin Builds a House (Tove), and Moomin and the TV (Lars).The convenient format presents these strips well, at a comfortable size which includes more stories in each volume than the larger volumes. This makes them a great value way to discover this classic work. The ideal presentation for reading these strips remains Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition which presents all Tove’s work on this series in one big book, correctly sequenced, with a few interesting extras.