Blofeld's Successors

There are at least two worthy successors of Ian Fleming's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the founder and director of SPECTRE:

Max in Andy Diggle's The Losers;
Zala in Stieg Larsson's Millennium novels.

Dig these guys. Code Name Max, "Blofeld meets Rumsfeld," exists for impossibly many decades and apparently in different places simultaneously. Zala is a GRU agent, then a defector, then a crime boss and also an abusive father.

Both Fleming and Larsson have been graphically adapted so this is all comics-related. I discuss the Larsson graphic adaptation here and here and Fleming here, here, here and here.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

My son-in-law, Ketlan, recommends the novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and one of its two film adaptations. Having just read Book One of the graphic novel adaptation by Denise Mina, Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti, he is not sure whether a reader unfamiliar with Larsson's original prose novel will follow the story in this graphic version so I am about to find out.

In the graphic adaptation of the first Batman film starring Michael Keaton, one panel depicted Bruce Wayne stooping and reaching towards a bunch of flowers on the ground. Had he just placed them there or was he about to pick them up? What was the context? Later, it was stated that every year, on the anniversary of his parents' murder, he placed flowers at the place where they had been killed but it was not initially clear to me either why he was placing flowers on the ground or even that he was doing so.

This is a case where what they intended to depict was clear to the artists (penciller, inker and colorist) but not necessarily to the reader. I will report back here on what I understand of what is going on in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Graphic Novel, Book One.

Interim Report: Some entire pages are without words. I find it difficult to follow what is going on here. But a single reading is not enough.

Interim II: Have read it through once but it needs at least one more complete reading, tomorrow at the earliest. There were a couple of points where I lost the continuity between panels.