Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Moomin Adventures: Book Three continues the reprinting of selected stories from several years of the daily newspaper comic strip featuring Tove Jansson’s beloved Finnish family, originally produced for the London Evening News from 1954. While the Moomins are completely identified with their creator Tove Jansson, the newspaper strip became a partnership between her and her brother Lars. He actually produced far more stories than she did, continuing to write and draw the series for fourteen years after Tove stepped away from daily newspaper work in 1959.

The selection of strips for these reprints do not follow the timeline of their original publication and instead later strips from Lars are combined with earlier strips from Tove in each volume. This makes the change in quality from Tove’s inspired solo work to Lars’ weaker contributions less evident, but the randomness that is introduced by mixing them up will make for occasionally confusing reading for new readers unfamiliar with this series. There are lots of links between stories that are lost by presenting them out of sequence. It’s a weird decision to wait until this third book for the very first strip Tove created for the Evening News, Moomin and the Brigands in which we are introduced to Moomin and his friends. This does not include Moominmamma and Moominpapa. One of the points of this intro story is that Moomin has no idea where the rest of his family is. In the original timeline son and parents are reunited in Tove’s second strip Moomin and Family Life. This strip has already appeared in this series of reprints: but in Book Two and not even in Book One. It’s all an oddly careless way to treat such highly regarded work by a treasured creator. The other strips in this book are Moomin and the Sea (solo Tove), Fuddler’s Courtship (Tove and Lars), Moominpappa and the Spies (Lars), Moomin Winter (Tove and Lars), Fuddler and Married Life (Tove and Lars) and Snorkmaiden Goes Rococo (Tove and Lars).

The convenient format presents these strips at a comfortable size and there are more of them in each book than appeared in the previous large hardcover volumes, making these new reprints a great value way to discover this classic work. However to get the most sympathetic intro to the world of Moomins, the ideal way to read these strips remains Moomin: The Deluxe Anniversary Edition, which presents all Tove’s work on this series in date order, in one large, slipcased book with some lovely extras.