The Guardian’s Best Books of 2014: Moomin, Delisle, Pond!

...A couple of collector’s items. I love Drawn & Quarterly’s deluxe anniversary edition of Tove Jansson’s Moomin comics (£12.99 each), which brings together all the strips she drew in the 50s for the London Evening News(Drawn & Quarterly rediscovered the cartoons in 2006, publishing them in a series of separate volumes for the first time in 40 years outside of Scandinavia). This single volume edition, which comes with several full-page, never-seen-before character studies and sketches, runs to 400 pages, and weighs in at about 2kg, and if you love Sniff, Snufkin and the rest, you’ll find it irresistible. 

At the other end of the scale, those in search of stocking fillers might like the pocket-sized Even More Bad Parenting Advice (Drawn & Quarterly £8.99), Guy Delisle’s follow-up to last year’s A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting. It does what it says on the tin, sending up Delisle’s inadequacies as a father in a series of beady vignettes. 

I enjoyed Mimi Pond’s Over Easy (Drawn & Quarterly £16.99) very much indeed. Something of a comeback for Pond – she hasn’t published a book in more than 15 years – this is a coming of age story about a student called Margaret, who drops out of art college for financial reasons and winds up waitressing in an Oakland diner. It’s also a sublimely evocative depiction of California in the 70s.