...way out on the corner of fucked up and evil...

As some of you may know, a new Moomin animated series is currently seeking backers on Indiegogo. They have sixteen days to go and have raised almost 40% of their $200,000 goal.

As some of you may also know, I am a huge Moomin fan. The kind of fan who travelled 400 miles to see the Moomin exhibit at the Southbank Centre in London (seriously it was amazing, go if you get the chance) and is really bitter that I'll miss the exhibit at Kew Gardens this Easter, because if I wasn't attending a wedding I'd totally deal with Gatwick Airport again.

I grew up on the Moomins, first the books and then the 1990s cartoon as a kid, and the comic strip (and the cartoon again when the dvds came out) at university and beyond. When I was in college, my friends and I claimed the Church of Snufkin as our religion and "Snufkin's Tent of Wisdom" as our house of worship. We waged war on our rivals, the Church of the Breadlike God, which ended when we stole the Holy Loaf and ate him. My final project for A Level Media Studies was on children's entertainment as a way of conveying complex ideas in a way that a young audience can comprehend, and I chose it specifically because I wanted to talk about the Moomins.

The versions of the "core canon" books that I own are the ones I've had since I was seven, and the preface on each says that Tove Jansson lived alone on an island, because God forbid you mention an author's same sex relationship in a kids' book in the nineties.

I read the truth years later in various biographies, but my point is that the Southbank tour I was on was for all ages, and the guide straight up said that Thingumy and Bob were Tove Jansson and theatre director Vivica Bandler. They had a whole room about Too-Ticky and Tuulikki Pietilä and the way that her relationship with Tove Jansson shaped Moominland Midwinter.

Afterwards, in the privacy of my cheap hotel room , I full on cried that I hadn't had the comfort of knowing that as a kid, that I found out years later in books aimed at adults. I don't know that it would have made my own journey easy, but I think it would have made it a little less hard.

I really want this new series to get made. I want an animated version of Comet in Moominland, and I want a Moominpapa at Sea where Moominpapa is a selfish dick and the seahorses are shallow and beautiful and cruel, and I want the Hemulen Who Loved Silence on my screen in all his sad, quiet longing.

The Moomins aren't necessarily a fandom we have in common, I know. But we do have at least one fandom in common, and so, for every $5 you donate to the Moomin Indiegogo, I will either write you a minimum of 100 words of eerie_indiana fanfic, or draw you two pieces of shitty biro art. Just head over to the Indiegogo page, make your donation, then drop me a comment or a private message letting me know what name you've used on the backers page.

You can request specific characters and give me specific prompts, and if you donate more than $5, I can either do multiple drabbles or longer pieces. Sadly, donating larger amounts will not result in you getting bigger or better art, because this represents the limit of my artistic ability.