The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo II

I have read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Graphic Novel, Book One, twice. It became clearer on the second reading but I still need to check some points with Ketlan who has read the novel and seen the films. Obviously, each adaptation should tell the story clearly enough on its own terms.

Seeing the film of a book sometimes makes us want to read the book. In this case, I am not in a hurry to read the original. I imagine that the disgraced journalist and the title character are view point characters for different chapters or sections of chapters? It would be interesting to read the memories, thoughts and feelings of the heroine since these are almost completely unstated in the graphic adaptation.

When a comic is based on a screen drama, whether cinema or TV, the characters are drawn to resemble the actors but, when a film and a graphic novel are independently based on a prose novel, there need not be any resemblance. This happened with Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. The comic was based either on the novel or on the TV script but not on the visuals of the TV series. The Black Friars were described as black men in the novel and were black on TV so should have been black in the comic. (The idea seemed to be a child's imagining of "Black Friars," as with some of the images in Alice. The child's viewpoint is a major feature in Gaiman's works.)

There are two films of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo but the comic is, like them, independently based on the novel so need not resemble either film.

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.