Drawn & Quarterly is planning to publish the biography of Moomin creator Tove Jansson next spring; the book is a translation of Juhani Tolvanen's Vid min svans! (By my tail!), to be renamed Comics in Moominland. At the D&Q blog, Tom Devlin posts an interesting excerpt from a 1959 letter from Jansson to her editor in which she gives her six-month notice:

During this time my life with Moomin has gone on like a well worn marriage. You must have realized long ago that I want to divorce him. You surely saw years ago that I was tired of him. Well, now I'm even more tired of him. A long time ago I was talking with the composer Dean Dixon and he told me, nicely but with scary directness, ‘Be careful, Tove. Soon people will see you as one more comic strip artist who wants to be an artist.’

Sure enough, six months later, Jansson turned over the reins to her brother Lars, who was already writing the strip and had been learning to draw as well. Moomin: the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip: Volume 5 is due out this week from D&Q, and Devlin says this is the last volume of Tove Jansson's work, but the good news is that they will be publishing Lars Jansson's strips as well, starting next year—and he drew the comic for twice as long as Tove.