Tove Jansson’s Moomin Modernism

Tove Jansson’s Moomin newspaper comic was one of the most widely distributed daily comics of its time, eventually reaching distribution in around 40 countries and 120 newspapers.[1] Between 1954 and 1957, Jansson wrote and illustrated the comic based on her Moomin series of children’s books, achieving newfound recognition for herself and her characters, while testing themes that would find their way into her later fiction. Jansson’s role in comics history is remarkable not least as a female cartoonist in a male-dominated industry but also as a major innovator of the comics form. Throughout her career, Jansson was active in a number of media, from literature and comics to painting, illustration, and stage design—at a time when modernist writers and artists had come to challenge the conventional boundaries between aesthetic forms and genres. In both her comics and her novels, Jansson draws intertextually on queer modernist literature, using her Moomin characters to articulate queer discontent by way of increasingly complex formal experiments.

Jansson’s English-language Moomin comic began its run in 1954, at a period when anglophone modernist literary culture was well into its “late” phase. In the comic, Jansson would employ a number of playful and experimental techniques that would push the limits of comics form through her creative use of backgrounds, panel borders, and metatextual address. Jansson had been asked by her editor to produce a daily comic for adult readers that would be “a little more sophisticated than your books” (quoted in Westin, Tove Jansson, 273). Through its popular success, and defined by its satirical “Moomin-minded” philosophy, Jansson’s comic positioned her as a critical observer of modern life. Her later work would see her cross over into literary fiction, first in the form of Moomin novels written in an allusive and symbolic style by way of intertextual references to queer modernism—a move that, as we will see, was already foreshadowed in her English-language comic. By the 1970s, Jansson had for the most part left behind the Moomin suite in order to focus on literary fiction and life writing, in works such as the autobiographical Bildhuggarens dotter (Sculptor’s daughter, 1968) and Sommarboken (The summer book, 1972). Jansson’s career, from the interwar period to late modernism and beyond, thus illustrates the uneasy fit of many twentieth-century women’s writers into “monolithic” histories of literary modernism with its implicit assumptions about period, style, genre, and geography.[2] 

Jansson wrote and illustrated the Moomin comic for the British newspaper syndicate Associated Newspapers, appearing first in the London-based daily newspaper The Evening News beginning in 1954. To meet the demanding pace of production, Jansson first composed the script of each comic in Swedish to be translated for English publication by her brother. Before the English-language Moomin comic, Jansson had worked in the comics medium with the short-lived Swedish-language comic Mumintrollet och jordens undergång (Moomintroll and the end of the world, 1947–1948), published in the Finnish-Swedish daily newspaper Ny Tid, which at the time was edited by the author’s close friend Atos Wirtanen. When Jansson was approached by the British newspaper syndicate to produce a new English-language Moomin comic, she had already published four Moomin children’s novels and one picture book in relatively modest Swedish-language editions. By this time, two of Jansson’s Moomin novels had already been published with wide success in English translation: Trollkarlens hatt (1948, translated as Finn Family Moomintroll, 1950) and Kometjakten (1946, translated as Comet in Moominland, 1951).

Such a varied body of work—from Jansson’s illustrated children’s books and literary fiction to her comics and visual art—is best understood against a mid-century backdrop of modernist formal and aesthetic experimentation. As Elina Drucker has documented, Jansson was among a number of Nordic authors of formally innovative experimental picture books, including Egon Møller-Nielsen and Egon Mathiesen. For these artists, picture books presented an opportunity to test the boundaries between media. As Mathiesen, a Danish artist and illustrator, argued in his essay-manifesto, “The Artist and the Picture Book,” modern art techniques could be introduced into children’s picture books inasmuch as they are “free from dogma, from standardized meanings and connotations.”[3] The Nordic picture book would thus emerge during the mid-century period as a medium for formal innovation and experimentation heavily influenced by modernist art and literature.

In an essay on the art of children’s literature, published in 1961 with the title “Den lömska barnboksförfattaren” (The deceitful author of children’s books), Jansson would argue for an aesthetics of ambiguity in children’s literature: “I en barnbok borde det finnas en väg där författaren stannar och barnet går vidare. Ett hot eller en härlighet som aldrig förklaras. Ett ansikte som aldrig visar sig helt” (In a children’s book there should be a path where the author stays and the child goes on. A threat or pleasure that is never explained. A face that never fully shows itself).[4] This principle of ambiguity was already exemplified in Jansson’s first Moomin picture book, published in Swedish in 1952, Hur gick det sen? Boken om Mymlan, Mumintrollet och Lilla My (What Happened Next? The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My). In this picture book, Jansson uses cut-out holes to connect events in the story, both revealing and obscuring the illustrations from one page to the next. Through unnatural colors, sharp-edged geometrical shapes, and panels with hand-drawn cursive and block letters, Jansson’s illustrations depict a journey through a threatening world in which the cut-out holes in each page reveal both a danger and a path towards escape. The result is a picture book filled with ambiguities whose unresolved tensions are maintained to the end through repeated movements of revealing and concealing.

Over the course of several illustrated Moomin books, Jansson developed a highly symbolic and allusive literary language, often in the service of queer and feminist resistance. Swedish literary critic Ebba Witt-Brattström has described Jansson’s Moomin suite as a “utopia of resistance” in which sex, gender, and desire are in constant flux (Witt-Brattström, ”Motståndets utopi,” 466). Gender non-conformity is a recurring element of the Moomin storyworld, as exemplified by the cross-dressing Hemulens and the character Too-ticky. In particular, the cross-dressing of the Hemulens would be highlighted in the first episode of the Moomin newspaper comic in which a Hemulen wearing a gown rejects an offer of an “elixir of life” to avoid the “trouble” of a “girl-friend” (1.25).[5] At the same time, Jansson would also use the Moomin suite to encode her own lesbian relationships, as for example the characters Tofslan and Vifslan—whose names refer to Tove and her lover at the time, Vivica Bandler— who had made their first appearance in Jansson’s early Swedish-language comic, Mumintrollet och jordens undergång (Moomintroll and the end of the world).

In this context, the Moomin suite can be read as a satire of the bourgeois, nuclear family, in which Moominmamma, Moominpappa, and the Moomintroll exemplify the Oedipal triad, while an extensive cast of side characters offers alternatives to conventional representations of gender and sexuality. In the Moomin home, along with the Moomin family, lives Snorkmaiden, Snufkin, and Sniff as adopted children and companions to the Moomintroll. As I have argued elsewhere, such queer and feminist aesthetics are evident throughout the Moomin newspaper comic, in which Jansson developed and elaborated on the queer and feminist themes likewise evident in her Moomin novels and picture books.[6] In particular, the Moomin novels written during and after Jansson’s work on the comic demonstrate her increasingly critical view of heteronormativity and the bourgeois family. In Farlig midsommar (1954, published in English as Moominsummer Madness, 1955), Moominmamma radically breaks with the home and housework to embark on her own adventure. And in Trollvinter (1957, published in English as Moominland Midwinter, 1958), Moomintroll learns to accept the ghostlike Groke (Mårran in Swedish) as a condition of growing up. Indeed, Jansson’s Moomin books and comics depict family life as haunted by ghosts and other ghost-like monsters—significant figures in a context in which “spöksidan,” literally “spook side” or “ghost side,” was a code word for lesbianism (Westin, Tove Jansson, 261).

Although coded references to queer culture abound in her work, Jansson adopted a pose of aesthetic distance when developing the Moomin newspaper comic, expressing her intention to avoid outright references to politics: “[A]bsolutely no politics! It would completely destroy the whole idea of something that is universally human, make the series too obvious and take away my joy in working on it.”[7] Here, Jansson employs a strategy recognizable in the genealogy of queer literary modernism since the time of Oscar Wilde. The aesthetic politics of Jansson’s Moomin suite is evident not just in its cultivated pose of aesthetic distance, but also its genre hybridity, working with children’s fantasy and literary fiction, picture books, and comics. As Elizabeth English has argued in the context of British modernism, “genre fiction served as a strategy for writing the lesbian.”[8] Historical fiction and fantasy, according to English, allowed writers to evade censorship by articulating queer desire in the guise of other historical periods or fantastical settings. Genre experimentation can thus be seen as a strategy especially for lesbian writers in the wake of the censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. To take one of the most famous examples, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) would employ biography, history, fantasy, and photography in her queer satire of English literary history. Employing genre experimentation as a queer literary strategy, Jansson’s Moomin suite not only crosses media boundaries, from illustrated novels to pictures books and comics, but also genres, from children’s fantasy to literary fiction.

“Moomin-minded” Philosophy

As it became the subject of debate and discussion, Jansson’s Moomin comic was understood by readers and reviewers as espousing a philosophy of being “Moomin-minded.” As Westin summarizes, “To be ‘Moomin-minded’, as one of the strips had it, became synonymous with a lifestyle to dream of, modelled on a world one could simultaneously long for and recognize oneself and one’s environment in” (Westin, Tove Jansson, 322). In this way, Jansson’s “Moomin-minded” philosophy offered a satirical vision that was highly appealing in its playful approach to the fixed conventions and stereotypical roles of modern society. Jansson was called on to lecture on Moomin philosophy throughout the Nordic region, and, as Westin notes, the first Ph.D. on the Moomins was submitted in Stockholm in 1964 (322–324).

In an interview for British readers, Jansson describes her process of composing each comic through “psychological moments, rather than pure adventure and environment” (quoted in Westin, Tove Jansson, 277). As readers of the comic would come to appreciate, Jansson’s comics create existential depth through psychologically nuanced explorations of everyday settings. For example, many of the most memorable scenes of the comic feature a solitary, brooding Moomintroll in a world turned upside-down by disaster. Throughout the comics, surrealistic transformations—the sudden appearance of a jungle or a flood, for instance—defamiliarize the everyday and force the characters to reassess their relationships with each other and the material world. In the episode “Moomin Mamma’s Maid,” when Moominmamma is pressed upon to hire a maid, she encourages her to do housework the “Moomin-minded” way—by washing dishes in the sea. Yet, when the Moomin family realizes that no amount of play can redeem domestic labor, the discontented Misabel is helped by the family to refashion her life and find meaning outside of work.

Jansson’s Moomin-minded philosophy became the topic for an episode of the newspaper comic called “Moomin Begins a New Life” (1956). As Ben Zahavi has argued, “Moomin Begins a New Life” can be read as a response to popular conceptions of Sartrean existentialism seeming to espouse radical freedom.[9] In the comic, two prophets come to Moomin Valley, one preaching hedonism and the other asceticism. The inhabitants of Moomin Valley are caught up by a rapid succession of new teachings, at which point Moominmamma abruptly breaks with the family to begin her own process of awakening, exclaiming, “I’m fed up with all this! Now I’m going to lead a free life as well” (8.38). When Moominmamma returns after a journey of her own, she explains to both prophets, “[b]oth of you teach nice things, but you must understand it’s all a little unpractical for ordinary people” (8.60). Moominmamma displaces the prophets competing for influence in Moomin Valley, resuming her position as matriarch over the unconventional Moomin family. In other words, Moominmamma’s break with the “unpractical” philosophies of modern life espoused by the distinctly masculine prophets of Moomin valley initiates not a return to normality, but an even more radical refusal of patriarchal authority. In this sense, Jansson’s satire of modern philosophy is also a feminist critique of the masculine pretenses to mastery represented by the positions of the “prophets” of modern life staked out in the comic.

Jansson and the Form of the Comics

In addition to their engagement with the “Moomin-minded” philosophy of modern life, readers of Jansson’s Moomin comics frequently note her innovative use of the form of the comic. As Juhani Tolvanen recounts, Jansson was given the advice by her newspaper editors to avoid dark or highly detailed backgrounds (Tolvanen, Vid min svans!, 51). Rejecting this advice, Jansson instead developed a technique for employing the visual elements of her panels as panel borders, essentially using characters, objects, and other details to mark the boundaries between one panel and another. As the panel borders also function as objects or characters within the storyworld, the comic frequently breaks the fourth wall to comment metatextually on the events of the comic itself. In such panel borders, background figures can be placed in the foreground and take on a life of their own. As K.A. Laity describes in her study of the panel borders in the first episode of the Moomin comic, “[t]he borders themselves often arise from elements of the panel art and suggest a dangerous instability to the usually safe Moomin world.”[10] In this sense, Laity argues, Jansson’s panel borders exemplify the breakdown of boundaries in the Moomin world particularly in terms of gender and sexuality. For example, in a strip analyzed by Laity from the first episode of the comic, the butterfly net carried by an insect-collecting Hemulen is used as a panel border at a particular moment of gender instability. When the Hemulen refuses the offer of an “elixir of life” so as to avoid “all that girl-friend trouble again” (1.25), the butterfly net marks the border between the panels, symbolizing the Hemulen’s refusal of heteronormativity in the form of instability between the borders between panels. In this case, the panel border stands in for and foregrounds the gender and sexual ambiguity represented in the comic’s narrative itself.

According to Tolvanen, twenty-six distinct objects comprise panel borders in the first episode of the Moomin newspaper comic alone: planks, measuring tape, a brush, a tree, a garden hose, a paintbrush, a door, a string, a spear, a flower, a pocket chain, a spider web, a flagpole, barbed wire, buoys, a butterfly net, a walking stick, a floating beacon, a ghost, artist’s accessories, a club, a wreath, a beaded ribbon, and rope (Tolvanen, Vid min svans!, 97). Through her use of objects from the storyworld as panel borders, Jansson activates the “gutter,” or the gap in space and time between the actions of each panel. In this way, Jansson makes visible the constitutive elements of the medium. Rather than discrete moments separated by a gutter, Jansson’s panel borders play an active role in the disposition of space and time in her comics. In filling the gutter between each panel with objects from the comic’s narrative, Jansson allows the space between panels to serve as an additional element of sequential narration, in some cases representing entire actions of their own. For example, in a strip from the fifth episode, the Mymble’s heart is impaled by a ski pole at the border between two panels (5.31). The heart impaled by a ski pole not only symbolizes the Mymble’s broken heart but also constitutes the precise moment connecting the panels in which the Mymble’s heart is broken by an insensitive ski instructor. As throughout the Moomin comic, the failure of heteronormative romance is one effect of the instability of boundaries reflected in Jansson’s use of panel borders.

Throughout the Moomin comics, background figures begin to take on a life of their own through their use as panel borders. For example, in the first episode, a white-bellied character goes unremarked in the background of each panel, only to, in the second episode, turn to a character named “Cousin Shadow” just outside the panel border and invite him to take his place in the comic. In this and other moments throughout the comic, background figures spill out over the borders of the panels to take up an unexpected place in the foreground. In another strip from the comic’s first episode, Jansson fills the panels with the “guests and relations” who have come to overwhelm Moomintroll’s home. In this strip, readers of the Moomin novels will recognize the Hattifatteners among the “guests and relations,” dangerous creatures who appear in large groups without the capacity for language. Filling the background of the panel, the Hattifatteners and their threatening multitudes embody the insistent demand for refuge that begins the first episode of the comic.

The visual excess of Jansson’s panels pushes the limits of the newspaper comics medium in which simple backgrounds with ample negative space are often preferred. At the same time, Jansson uses the space of the panel to draw the Moomin household as an unconventional home in which bourgeois respectability is unsettled and the family is reimagined as a queer space of refuge. In this sense, Jansson’s play with the form of the newspaper comic reflects her envisioning of unconventional, queer families for her characters.

Queer Modernism in the Moomin Comics

Modernism and the modern art world are satirized throughout the Moomin comic at moments that illustrate the ambivalence of creation and the role of the artist in a commercialized aesthetic sphere . In the first episode of the newspaper comic, Moomintroll is drawn with an artist’s hat and encouraged by his companion Sniff to “do whatever kind of art you wish.” When Moomintroll, whose eyes become completely covered by the artist’s hat, proceeds to walk off a cliff, Sniff comments, “Well . . . it was his own fault” (1.54). As Westin recounts, Jansson’s commercial success with the newspaper comic brought anxiety over managing the business of her Moomin characters, with the increasing requests for licensing agreements for advertisements and spin-off products (281-285). Eventually, Jansson would leave the comic to be written and illustrated by her brother Lars, signaling a pulling back from the Moomin world, before ultimately continuing the Moomin suite in the form of increasingly complex novels in the 1960s. At this point, when Jansson is on the brink of withdrawing from the Moomin series, her English-language comic positions itself most clearly in relation to queer modernism, understood as both an aesthetic project and a literary and cultural genealogy in its own right.

Among the later novels of the Moomin suite published after Jansson left the newspaper comic is Pappan och havet (1965), published in English as Moominpappa at Sea. The Swedish title, literally “The Father and the Sea,” clearly alludes to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, yet the events of the novel build more closely on Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In Pappan och havet, the Moomin family leaves Moomin Valley to take over an abandoned lighthouse, each family member undergoing their own inward journey of discovery and transformation. Before the composition of the novel, Jansson premiered a version of the story of Pappan och havet in the twelfth episode of the newspaper comic titled “Moomin and the Sea” (1957), one of the last of the comics to be written and illustrated by Jansson herself. Jansson’s Pappan och havet and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse contain numerous parallels: Mr. Ramsay grows closer to his family through the journey to the lighthouse, as does Moominpappa. Lily Briscoe observes the Ramsay family from a distance, similar to the outsider and troublemaker Little My.

Written and published much earlier than Jansson’s later novel, the newspaper comic “Moomin and the Sea” contains many of the same story elements as Pappan och havet. But, as Björn Sundmark has pointed out, the two versions differ considerably in tone and atmosphere.[11] Where Snorkmaiden is entirely absent from Pappan och havet, her romance with Moomintroll continues in the newspaper comic. While the characters in Pappan och havet must learn to accept the unsettling presence of the Groke, a threatening figure whose intermittent appearances disturb the characters throughout the Moomin novels, it is a relatively harmless ghost who visits the lighthouse and tests the Moomin family in “Moomin and the Sea.” In the end, the ghost is accepted as a welcome visitor to the Moomin home—the family even shouts after the ghost’s departure, “Bye, bye! Come home and haunt some time, too!” (12.96). At the same time, the comic portrays the process of artistic creation in parallel with the vision of intellectual and creative labor displayed in To the Lighthouse. At the end of “Moomin and the Sea,” Moominpappa abandons his great novel of the sea, preferring the comforts and familiarity of home, while Moominmamma finishes her paintings of the lighthouse walls “with a Moominvalley motif” (12.93). In Jansson’s comic, the failure of masculine literary labor is contrasted with the triumph of feminist artistic creation.

The most significant difference between “Moomin and the Sea” and Pappan och havet is the continuing romance between Moomintroll and Snorkmaiden featured in the newspaper comic. Yet Jansson’s frustration with the gendered expectations of heteronormative romance becomes increasingly obvious in this episode of the comic. When Moomintroll asks Moominpappa, “why must men pretend to be brave?” Moominpappa’s answer—“Pretend? We are brave, of course. At least that’s what I’ve always been told”—reveals a suspicion that all gender is performative (12.30). While Moominpappa and Moominmamma spend the episode immersed in their own creative endeavors, Moomintroll and Snorkmaiden use the island as a backdrop for enacting stereotypical scenes of heteronormative romance. As Moomintroll becomes increasingly desperate in his attempts to prove his bravery for Snorkmaiden, Snorkmaiden thinks to herself, “I would never have forgiven him if I had to pity him still more!” (12.73). In the end, Snorkmaiden and Moomintroll’s romance continues but not without qualifications, as gender performativity threatens to undermine the positions that have made their romance possible in the first place.

Working in different media, Jansson was able to use genre hybridity to satirize the bourgeois family and call into question dominant representations of gender and sexuality. Having been asked to produce a newspaper comic more “sophisticated” than her novels for children, Jansson experimented with comics form through her detailed backgrounds, panel borders, and metatextual address. In her formal experimentation, Jansson’s wildly playful comics style is comparable with the likes of pioneers Winsor McCay and George Herriman. Her comics employ such formal and genre experimentation to articulate discontent with dominant narratives of heteronormativity while exploring queer and feminist alternatives, a project deepened in the Moomin illustrated novels and picture books. The Moomin family, in its satire of the bourgeois, nuclear family, offers a queer space of refuge for an expansive cast of characters from the margins of society. Throughout the Moomin comics, the “Moomin-minded” philosophy, grounded in everyday life and the material world, challenges the patriarchal authority exemplified by the masculine “prophets” of modern life. So too, Jansson’s references to literary modernism extend her satire of the pretensions of masculine literary endeavor, while writing herself and her characters into a long genealogy of queer modernism.