A review by jackiijackii
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Leonardo Manco, Denise Mina, Andrea Mutti

3.0

The trilogy was amazing, and their translations into film were equally amazing, so perhaps a graphic novel just isn't the perfect medium for this story that I love as novels and films. It felt more like... someone read it and had an artist draw the scenes verbatim (does that work in a words-to-image context?), but with a very limited number of pages. The art wasn't bad, not at all. Lisbeth is stunning. But there was a lot of empty space in the book, filled with landscapes and cerebral stuff, and sometimes just quietness, which works well to create a mood in a book, but in this context, I just found it kind of boring. I also wasn't loving the emphasis on Blomkvist's weird, passive-aggressive relationship with Cecilia. It made it seem like she was going to have a bigger role in everything, instead of having just one instance where we see she's kinda crazy and needy and leaving it at that. There were too many other things that could have been included that would have fit nicely with this edited/shortened version, and Cecilia took up too many panels for me. But then, the one-page flashback of Lisbeth seeing her mom beaten up made her childhood and state of mind immediately clear in those few panels, so I don't know why everything wasn't as succinct. Still love the story though, so three stars it is.