In temperament, Moomin is an innocent, idealistic child, one given to runs of bad luck and Byronic melancholy. He's sort of like a mix of Charlie Brown and Eeyore, in a cute little pygmy hippopotamus' body.
When we first meet Moomin, he's fretting over the number of unwanted houseguests he has crowding his home, and his unwillingness to tell them to leave, which would be "ill-mannered." An attempt to surreptitiously drive them out, egged on by his friend Sniff, leads to a bizarre series of events.
Of course, Moomin's entire life is seemingly a bizarre series of events, as Jansson's plots operate on a sort of random dream logic, zigging and zagging on new, wholly random plot points. The first of the four loose storylines in this volume, for example, is about Moomin and Sniff's quest for fame and fortune, and it involves brief stints as snake oil salesmen, convicts, modern artists, sideshow freaks, big-game trappers and fortune-tellers. There's also a magic plant that turns people into balloons, a beauty contest, a ghost, some brigands, a gigantic sea monster and magic seeds that grow demanding relatives.
It must have made for a strange read in a daily paper, given how the story spills from strip to strip. It's nothing at all like the formulaic two panels of set-up, one panel of punch line gag strips that dominate our newspapers today. In fact, the late Jansson's innovative use of panels and understanding of the medium make her Moomin strips seem far more modern than many 2006 comic strips.
SideScrollers
Oni Press
Matthew Loux's first graphic novel as both writer and artist should prove enormously popular with a certain demographic—twenty- and thirtysomethings raised on video games, Saturday morning cartoons, Star Wars and John Hughes, like the trio of friends who star in this fun and funny hipster adventure story.
Brian, Brad and Matt have just graduated from high school and are spending/wasting their first summer of adulthood working at a fast food joint and playing video games. (For readers with lives, the title of the book refers to a side-scrolling video game, one in which the action is viewed from the side and moves horizontally from left to right, like Super Mario Brothers and most of the pre-3D games of the '80s and '90s.)
The story is essentially an action-packed day in their lives, and the book follows them on a game-like quest to save their co-worker (and crush object) Amber from their former high school's football-team captain, who, in grand teen-movie tradition, has a bet going regarding deflowering her after the big indie rock show they're all going to that night. Along the way, other conflicts arise, including overcoming shyness and overcoming a diabolical house cat from hell named Boots.
With the action set in and around parking lots, malls, bars and fast-food chains, and with off-beat pop culture arguments on such topics as whether Frankenberry could take Tony the Tiger in a fight, comparisons to Kevin Smith's body of work are perhaps inevitable.
It's worth noting, however, that Loux's suburban slackers are less foul-mouthed and gay-sex-obsessed than your average Smith heroes, and SideScrollers has a sense of optimistic, almost sweet nostalgia about it that's missing from too many of Smith's films.
Several detours into cartoon logic, like a Looney Tune-esque chase scene and anime-style fight scenes, give the proceedings the sort of zany unpredictability that has made the similarly intentioned Scott Pilgrim series so beloved.