The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

At the Brussels Belgian Comic Strip Centre, a nice little exhibition has been put up about Moomin, Finland’s best known contribution to comics. Originally, creator Tove Jansson (1914-2001) wrote and illustrated a series of illustrated novels featuring the white, hippopotamus-like creatures. Over the years though, the world of the Moomins expanded and currently includes television cartoons, a theme park, illustrated books and, indeed, comics.

(Moonins by Tove Jansson)

These comics were originally created as serialised strips for the Finnish daily Ny Tid, and then from 1954 to 1959 were syndicated in the London Evening News. Tragically, the London syndicate destroyed the artworks from all but one episode of her 1950s comics, but the exhibition contains a wide selection of Jansson’s very detailed pencil sketches, which are shown alongside printed proofs of the finished strips. Also included are the recently restored introductory drawings that Jansson used to pitch stories to her publishers, and to introduce her readers to new characters for a particular story.

In order to provide some context to the place of Moomin in Jansson’s life and work, the exhibition provides an overview of her background and her life with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä through photographs, paintings and film footage. Additionally, about fifty rare original drawings (on loan by the Tove Jansson Archives in Moominvalley, Finland) show the wide variety in Jansson’s artistic career, which included cartoons and illustrations for the 1930′s satirical magazine Garm (which quite often feature creatures that can be considered prototypes of what later would become the Moomin trolls), but also book covers and illustrations, quite often for equally fantastic books such as Alice In Wonderland or The Hobbit.

In all honesty, I must say that I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about when Drawn and Quarterly started reprinting the Moomin strips a couple of years ago. People whose taste and judgement I trust were over the moon, but I really was quite puzzled. After seeing Jansson’s art at the Centre, I guess there was quite some nostalgia involved there, a longing for the characters that were your friends when you were a child (the way I fondly remember Wickie the Viking, say). Still, I was very impressed by the quality and the clarity of the art, albeit especially in the non-Moomin pieces. From what I’ve seen, the stories themselves are quite ideosyncratic and quite non-consequential (don’t shoot me over this, that’s just my opinion), but the art is wonderful.

Overall, I think that the exhibition, small in scale though it may be, offers a good insight in Jansson’s carreer and art, and very consciously limits itself to those elements that are related to Moomin as a comics phenomenon. It’s a quite little show, nice to look at, for a quite little strip.

Tove Jansson’s Dreamworld, at the Belgian Comic Strip Centre, Rue des Sables 20, 1000 Brussels (Belgium), Tel.: + 32 (0)2 219 19 80, email visit@comicscenter.net. until August 29th, 2010.

As an aside, I would like to do an update on my report on the Brussels Comics Centre from a couple of years ago. In the mean time, the Centre turned twenty, and it has taken the opportunity to thoroughly re-evaluate its offerings. The website got spruced up, and the Centre got heavily involved in the established social networks, but thankfully they also decided to slightly overhaul the way the museum part works.

I hasten to say that they didn’t touch the Treasury, which seems to have introduced a rotation system in the originals that are on display, or the Museum of the Imagination, an overview of the golden era of Franco-Belgian comics (although I couldn’t help but notice that the exhibits there had been heavily dusted and had been given a dearly needed fresh coat of paint). The complete second floor, though, is gone. No more flash-back to 1982, but rather a stark overview of 2 comics that were elemental in forming the artform that comics are today. This new exhibit is airy, accessible for non-specialists and quite informative. And, above all, it contains originals for each of the 21 titles (Monster, Black Hole, Le Photographe, Donjon, Spirou – Journal d’un Ingenu, etc.), which also makes it interesting for more dedicated visitors. Sadly, though, this exhibition is only on temporary display (until the end of the month), so you’d better hurry.

Still, the Belgian Comic Strip Centre is once more well worth the visit, if you’re in Brussels.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and would like to point out that Strip museum in Belgium is quite different from the strip joints in the neighbouring Netherlands; you can read more of his comics musings on The Ephemerist blog