Trolling cute

So my husband went to Helsinki and brought me a tandem of trolls Except, Moomintrolls are sorta the Mickey Mouse of Finland. They are everywhere on airplanes and aprons and eggcups. Moomins are cute, in a fluffy-white lurching hippo kind of way. Except they&rsquore not all fluff. At least not in a bookshop. Because lovable Moominpapa, Moominmama, Moomin (our eponymous everytroll), Snorkmaiden, helpful Sniff and contentious Snufkin can sugarcoat quite an acerbic series of social comments. On consumer culture and middle-class aspirations. On boys&rsquo toys and girlish vanities. Tove Jansson first created them in the 1940s. The comic strips she drew in the 1950s (later continued by her brother Lars) have now been republished in bound collections &mdash of which I now own the first two volumes (&euro16.90 each). The Janssons are dead. Long live the Moomintrolls.