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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 14 (Finale)

"An end, as well as the beginning." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 13

"On the question of desire, physical and unconscious, wishes that can be fulfilled or not, possible outcomes that only the mind can imagine and perhaps a closer look at what makes someone be themselves in the present time." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 12

"I'm back! I've spent these days finishing some pages while working on other projects. Also, Christmas is next week, how time flies. Anyway, hope you enjoy some pages of a very (and quite unlikely to be seen) introspective Sniff." — Janet

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An Introduction

Well, hello there!

Welcome to Paper Hats, a Moomin fancomic project written and drawn by @janetkwallace for the purpose of showcasing his/her/their artistic talents by transforming words into images, which may or may not accurately reflect each other, but which are somehow connected.

What is Paper Hats?

Paper Hats is a Moomin fanfiction I've been writing since 2022. You can read it on Archive of Our Own (AO3).

The title came from a song by This Heat, one of my favorite bands at the time I wrote the first drafts. So far, it has eight chapters in total and, at some point, I thought "what if I adapted this story into a comic book?", and that's how it all began.

And what's the story about? What are the themes?

Well, it began as a study of Mrs. Fillyjonk's character, an exploration of her worries and fears, whether a person's negative traits define their entire being and how someone feels after doing something wrong. The overall tone is borrowed from Moominpappa at Sea and November in Moominvalley, both novels which featured a melancholic and somber mood. I enjoy writing introspective characters and how they sort out thoughts, manage disorders, express their feelings, and this story is about states of mind, reflected in the writing and art style.

The writing

Stream of consciousness. Lots and lots of stream of consciousness, combined with introspection, nostalgia, existentialism and the absurd that is to think, act and feel about things. I try to make the characters as sympathetic as possible while not denying their flaws. And speaking of flaws, Paper Hats is a story about characters reflecting on their wrongdoing, what it means to them and others.

The artwork

Most of the comic is made up of individual pieces of art that somehow interconnect to tell a story. The text exists to complement the art, while the art exists to illustrate various meanings based on the text chosen for the page. Sometimes the text and artwork do not match at all, but they exist with each other. Eh, it's very experimental, and a lot of the artwork is there to translate emotions that always change shape, size, color, everything.

The inspiration for this comic came after I read "wake Up", a Daredevil comic written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by David Mack. The artwork of those comics has a dreamy, oneiric look, which I'm very fond of.

Artistic influences

Besides Tove Jansson, here’s a few: Francis Bacon, Bill Sienkiewicz, August Natterer, Barry Windsor-Smith, Hirō Isono, Deryk Thomas, Paul Klee, etc.

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 11

"More existentialism, and also Sniff reminisces about a day when he met his parents, the Muddler and the Fuzzy. A few easter eggs are hidden within these pages, by the way." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 10

"So, like I said in the beginning, this comic, and the fic that inspired it, were based on an episode of Adventure's Diary, the second season of the 1990's Moomin anime. That season is rather infamous, be it due to the decrease in animation's quality or the inconsistent characterization or the very harsh tone shifts within episodes.

When I first saw the episode in which Sniff had a momentary crush on someone, the moment he gets slapped in the face for plucking Houska’s flowers out of the ground, I asked myself “Is this supposed to be funny? Because it isn’t”, and then some creepy music plays as a tearful Houska shrinks down and weeps over her dead flowers, and that’s the last we see of the poor thing.

What the hell. Until then, the episode was silly fun and then it became this, uh… Okay, the first season also had somber moments, like the Groke’s arrival at the Moominhouse or Moominpappa being haunted by creatures when he leaves the orphanage or Little My being chased by The Lady of The Cold, yet those moments didn’t come out of nowhere. 

Well, the tone shift gets worse. Sniff cries, Moomintroll and his friends try to convince him to forget Houska, he runs away and there’s a quiet moment where Sniff is sitting on the pier, no dialogue, he stands up and his friends, who had been looking for him, think he’s about to commit suicide, and I’m not kidding. Well, they don’t say the word suicide, they say Sniff can’t swim, so yeah…If he can’t swim, that means he’ll drown.

And then some funny music plays as Moomintroll, Snorkmaiden and Little My race towards the pier. It’s not the moment for funny music to be played when seconds ago you had this dramatic, silent montage of Sniff sitting on his own looking nowhere in particular as he stands up and I wonder why was that necessary? 

I… I don’t know what to say, it’s so weird and out of place for a Moomin episode to have a moment where a character is about to drown, even though Sniff later said he only wanted to wash his face after all the pain he’s been through, but the other characters though he was… Like, why? I rewatched that episode many times and I’m still in doubt as to whether that scene was meant to be taken seriously or if it was supposed to be funny or if it’s just a mess.

I apologize for the unusually long post, but I had to get this out of my chest, and I thought it would be neat for the reader to understand the meta context behind the creation of the pages seen above." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 9

"The absurdity that is to find reason where there is none." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 8

"Sniff's memories vary in intensity and strength, depending on how he thinks about them, how much he thinks about them and whether they can really hurt him as much as he felt hurt at the time. But he wasn't the only one who got hurt, was he?" — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 7

"How is it possible that people can understand each other and, at the same time, they don't understand themselves?" — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 6

"What can you do when it seems like you can't do anything right? What is there to say when it feels like you're not the one talking? If the feelings someone once had for another person don't disappear overnight, what does it take to make the memories of those terrible first impressions to fade away?" — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 5

"A strange emotion is tearing Sniff apart. Something he can't quite understand, and probably no one has been able to before." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 4

"When everything goes wrong, but it's all in the mind of the beholder. Or is it? Are any of these things real? It certainly doesn't seem like reality, but reality isn't just made up of logic and gravity that plucks apples from trees." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 3

"A couple of extra memories, from The Great Flood to the present day." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 2

"A collection of memories. Painful, delightful, mesmerizing memories." — Janet

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Paper Hats Chapter VII: Forget We Ever Met, Pt. 1

"Our story begins as a spiritual continuation to Episode 80 of 1990's Moomins, "The Girl With Birds/Sniff Falls In Love". I'll be sharing it first since it's by far the most complete and organized story on my drive. Hope you enjoy!" — Janet

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I'm very fond of Houska, in case you did not know by now. I've used both GIMP and Krita to make this. It began as a "what if I colored a drawing in the style of the Toffle book?" and it ended like this. It's not very often that I scan a drawing with 600dpi, only in special occasions. The original drawing + color map + halftone layer + watercolor layer + CMYK layer + newsprint layer + a few other artistic layers = the final result as you see it

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Update on Paper Hats

So, a while ago, I've shared a few pages of an experimental Moomin comic project I've been working on called "Paper Hats", and it's still going. Here are some finished pages without dialogue, and now that I got a new printer, I'll get to reprint some old pages in hi-res.