Moomin: The Complete Comic Strip, Volume 1, by Tove Jansson & Fair Play, by Tove Jansson, trans. Thomas Teal

To write fiction well for children and for the child in all adults takes a variety of gifts, among them directness and lucidity with words and emotions, and the courage to keep them clean of pretence. This becomes especially true when crafting illustrated stories, where pictures as well as words do the telling and both need to enhance each other. For those who have delighted in the depths which Tove Jansson achieved through her beloved Moomin tales, these two books reveal how, throughout her life, she refined her narrative skills, first for her comics, and then for her adult novels.

In 1952, the Helsinki-born author, then 37, jumped at a rewarding contract to create "an interesting strip cartoon, and not necessarily for children" that would use her upright, mouthless, hippo-like clan "to satirise the so-called civilised way of life". Jansson's dream that the money from crafting "only six comic strips in a week" for the London Evening News would leave her free enough to pursue painting was soon replaced by the time-consuming challenges of devising Moomin serials in daily episodes of two to five panels. A relative novice to the medium, she brought to it a sense of discovery, growing to revel in the playful possibilities of the form, such as vertically dividing pictures with trees, doors or a spider-web. In contrast to her Moomin books until that time, she pared the text down to succinct dialogue in balloons, multiplying pictures to animate the foibles and charms of her eccentric cast.

Far from some sideline, her strips, more than 800 in five years, stand as perennial classics of children's literature across the Nordic lands. Yet in Britain they were compiled into only one collection in 1957, leaving a treasure-trove of her art and writing unjustly unknown. Their belated recovery from crumbling newsprint into five eventual volumes seems almost as fantastical and life-affirming as the Moomin fables themselves.

After Jansson handed over the strip to her brother Lars, she turned to writing specifically for adults from 1968. She brought to her novel Fair Play, published in 1989 when she was 75, all the economy and bell-like clarity she perfected in her Moomin books and comics. These 17 interwoven vignettes unfold "a life of work, delight and consternation" shared by two women, partners and companions.

Though rooted in Jansson's own relationship with the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, this portrait of a couple transcends autobiography to disclose the creativity of living and loving day by day, weathering irritations, jealousies and artistic struggles through a blend of fairness and playfulness.

Fittingly, in what would be her final novel, Fair Play gently celebrates that same patience, accommodation and understanding which were always at the heart of her extended, alternative Moomintroll family, and culminates her lifelong theme of enduring love.

Paul Gravett's books include 'Graphic Novels: stories to change your life' (Aurum)

Moomin: The Complete Comic Strip, Volume 1: Drawn & Quarterly £12.99 (96pp) (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Fair Play: Sort of Books £6.99 (127pp) (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897