In the second volume of Tove Jansson’s humorous yet melancholic Moomin comic strip, we get four new stories about jealousy, competition, childrearing, and self-reinvention. The Moomins try to hibernate in the fashion of their ancestors but insomnia places them smack dab into a winter carnival with the winter-sports loving Mr. Brisk. The fickle and eternally lovestruck Mymble and Snorkmaiden find themselves in competition over a thrilling new man. Moominmamma meets her new neighbor, the Fillyjonk, causing her to hire the depressed and secretive Misabel as her new maid. Mymble’s mother arrives on the Moomin family’s doorstep with her seventeen new children. Finally, a prophet arrives on the scene declaring that the happy Moomins are in fact not happy at all and need to get back to nature and be free. Moomin, of course, becomes more and more miserable the freer he gets.
Jansson is revered around the world as one of the foremost children’s authors of the twentieth century for her illustrated Moomin chapter books. The Drawn & Quarterly reprint series collects, for the first time in North America, Jansson’s internationally syndicated Moomin comic strip that debuted in the London Evening News in 1954.