Tove Jansson was studying in Stockholm and living with her Swedish relatives, her uncle tried to stop her pilfering food by telling her that a "Moomintroll" lived in the kitchen closet and breathed cold air down people's necks. In 1952, after "Comet in Moominland" and "Finn Family Moomintroll" had been translated into English, a British publisher asked if Tove Jansson would be interested in drawing comic strips about the Moomins. Jansson had already drawn a long Moomin comic adventure, "Mumintrollet och jordens undergång" ("Moomintrolls and the End of the World"), based loosely on "Comet in Moominland", for the Swedish-language newspaper "Ny Tid",
Tove Jansson is a work of charm, subtlety and simplicity, describing the summer stay on an island of a young girl and her grandmother. The girl is modelled on her niece, Sophia Jansson; the girl's father on Sophia's father, Lars Jansson; and the grandmother on Tove's mother Signe. Although she became known first and foremost as an author, Tove Jansson considered her careers as author and painter to be of equal importance. She painted her whole life, changing style from the classical impressionism of her youth to the highly abstract modernist style of her later years. Jansson displayed a number of artworks