muumi

CREATOR

Name: Tove Marika Jansson.
Personal dates: Born 1914 in Finland. Died 2001 in Finland.
Other creations: None.
Successors: Lars Jansson (younger brother) wrote the stories from 1958, and from 1961 to 1974 he also produced the graphics. Since then several artists have been working on the series.
Comments:

MAIN STORY

The series premiered in 1945 as books and in 1952 as comic books.

From the start Jansson wanted to create a series that was 'naive and innocent', as she put it herself. The result was the Moomin family (Muumi in Finnish) who are living quiet lives in the Moomin Valley, and their foremost wish is to be good to each other. The series involves a large gallery of diverse characters all with different characteristics.

The publisher refused to use the word Muumi for the first couple of books (the characters were called trolls instead), but from 1948 the name was accepted.