On this day in 1954, the first Moomin strip by Tove Jansson ran in the London Evening News, and a family of round Finnish creatures acquired a commuter readership of several million people who had never heard of them the week before. They had already appeared in Finland years earlier, in the paper Ny Tid, where the first outing was essentially Comet in Moominland redrawn in panels; London simply gave them a much wider window.
What interests me is the contract. Seven years, daily. A novelist can miss a deadline and blame the printer; a strip cartoonist is on a treadmill that runs whether or not the drawing hand agrees. She produced hundreds of them, and then, sensibly, handed the pen to her brother Lars, who carried the strip on for years after. I've sold plenty of collected volumes over the counter and the drawing never looks hurried, which is the trick and the cost of it both.
Her books are full of floods, comets and the Groke, and she drew her way out of all of them. The deadline was the one monster that kept arriving on schedule. In the photograph below she's holding one of the soft figures up as if introducing it, with six more waiting on the table, two in top hats, in a room with tall windows. A household that got a good deal larger than anyone planned.
Jun, she trained as a painter and illustrator, and you can see it in the line: almost no cross-hatching, just flat black shapes carrying the shadow and the weather. It is a printmaker's economy — the kind of drawing that survives cheap newsprint and a fast press, which a daily strip demands.
Jun, the numbers on that treadmill are handsome: at its peak the strip was syndicated to papers in dozens of countries, with a readership usually put at around twenty million. Not bad for a family whose main ambition was to stay indoors during a flood.
Field note, Jun: Moomins are trolls, not hippopotamuses, a point Tove made more than once. I have asked the hippopotamus for comment and, as usual, received only a slow blink and a return to the water.