Something pro-choice people talk about is that pro-life billboards often don’t show the mother’s face, which apparently makes her into an object, or some sort of baby factory. That might be true, but the baby’s face is even less visible. In fact, you can’t see the baby at all. It’s hidden.

Once, art was like that. You only got to see the end result – the laborious and painful creation process was hidden from public view. A project was announced, and then you’d have no idea of how it was going. Maybe the creator was having the time of his life, or was reaching for the shotgun, or was farming the project off on to an unpaid and uncredited assistant. You didn’t know.

The internet in general and the webcomic in particular changed that. People would upload comics sequentially, page by page. If a update was late, you might get an apology and an explanation why. A bit destructive to the artist’s mystique, but it was interesting. Like if pregnant women had transparent stomachs and you could see the fetus twist and writhe and struggle.

The Blackblood Alliance was a webcomic I liked when my age was less than it is now (tautology). It was a story about talking wolves, with lots of action, and art heavily inspired by The Lion King and Balto. It was familiar and safe, but good for what it was. The creator, Kay Fedewa, would upload pages and talk about them and redraw them as her skills became better.

Unfortunately, not all pregnancies result in a birth. This one ended in a miscarriage. The first issue was completed, and then updates became less frequent, and then stopped altogether. From time to time Kay would announce on DeviantArt that she had turned a corner, was resuming work on the comic, was more inspired than ever, etc. Nothing happened. I heard rumors of personal trouble: the death of a mother. Either way, it was clear that Kay was no longer capable of finishing The Blackblood Alliance.

Maybe she aimed too high. She had big plans for the Blackblood Alliance, such as an MMORPG and a cartoon series. Maybe when those things failed, they took the comic down with them. I don’t know. I got to see part of the comic’s creation, but the really crucial parts remained close to me. Eventually she admitted defeat and handed the comic over to partner Erin Siegel, who has done a whole lot of nothing with it. I wonder if both Kay and Erin regard The Blackblood Alliance as something they did when they were kids – what excites you now won’t excite you forever. Mario Puzo actually wanted to write another book instead of the Godfather. When questioned about it years later, he said “subject matter rots like everything else.”

The fragmentary first issue of The Blackblood Alliance still exists online. Has the rest of it rotted in Kay’s head? Maybe. But that to me makes it really special – probably more special than if the comic had been completed. It’s forever a question mark, forever a mystery. The story is stuck in limbo: it hasn’t ended, and it never will. The internet was the way Kay chose to distribute the comic, but ultimately all it did was show readers exactly how a comic can wither and die on the vine.

McCartney wrote to Lennon “You took your lucky break and broke it in two”. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes its lucky break and breaks it into at least three or four. It starts out as an exciting story about journalism, white-collar crime, and ethics, and ends up trying to be American Psycho. The sleazy human interest elements ruin the story, which was a shame, because the story was great. Never have I seen a book so in flight from its strengths.

The story is about journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who has just lost a libel suit against a crooked industrialist. With his professional reputation in tatters, and a prison stint looming, he accepts a strange proposal. Forty years ago, the daughter of a legendary Swedish businessman went missing, and a member of the family might be guilty of her murder. Blomkvist must investigate the massive Vanger clan, and try to warm up a case so cold that it’s covered in permafrost.

“Businessman” is one of fiction’s ubiquitous code words. In a porno, it means you don’t satisfy your wife. In a family film, it means you’re a type-A workaholic who forgets his son’s birthday. In a Michael Moore film, it means you’re an amoral monster who probably belongs in a room with padded walls. Stieg Larsson takes no half measures, and provides us with a few businessmen of each description. Some of the Vanger family are nasty, which is troubling. Some of them seem nice – which is even more troubling, because they wouldn’t be in a book like this if they were nice.

The Girl in the title is Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker. She’s an interesting and marketable character, but the book gives her little to do. She commits a few computer crimes and gets even with a rapist. This is mostly Blomkvist’s show, as the strange story of the Vanger clan uncoils like a snake in the grass. Each discovery raises new questions, and new dangers – some people aren’t happy to have a disgraced journalist rattling the local skeletons.

The book was fine up until this point, and then all manner of fecal products started hitting all manner of spinning blades. There’s a sudden and implausible serial killer plotline, and a Saw-esque torture dungeon…all I could think of was “what?” I don’t have an issue with anything in the book for it is, but they make no sense with what went before. Part of what I liked about Dragon Tattoo was its grounding in reality, and suddenly all of that was yanked away. The sudden twists and turns into B-movie gore porn only succeeded in giving me whiplash.

American Psycho worked at a certain level, but that was because you make concessions to it (it’s a heavily stylised book, it’s metaphorical, it’s told by an unreliable narrator.) Put elements of its plot in a John Grisham book and they’d just seem unbelievable and ridiculous. A book has to have a certain internal logic, an unspoken agreement of what can happen and what can’t. All Dragon Tattoo does is succeed in being a malformed literary chimaera.

The final pages just screw things up even more, with characters taking visits to Australia (??), while the reader gets bodyslammed with plot twist after implausible plot twist. The result is a huge, overstuffed, unconvincing mess: too many reveals, too many changes of motivation, too many themes, too many characters, and not enough sanity. Reading Dragon Tattoo is like going for a car ride and finding that your destination is a beach, an amusement park, and a zoo all rolled into one – with the rollercoaster awash in seawater and tigers climbing the Ferris Wheel.

I watched this more times than the first Lion King movie. I think I was trying to persuade myself that it was better than the original. It isn’t, of course, but it’s still quite good – probably Disney’s best direct to video movie.

The music is not as good as the first movie, and overall things aren’t as bright and colourful and fun. Here the palette is muddy and dark, especially in the final scene, which makes Africa look rather like a Stalinist gulag. The Timon and Pumba characters are given a lot of time…probably a bit too much. I find them distracting.’

But the story’s surprisingly good, picking up where the first one left off. Not a lot of kids movies show the consequences of the hero’s actions, but this one does, with large numbers of Scar’s supporters banished from the tribe and nursing their wounds in the desert. The plot is a bit similar to other Disney movies, but The Lion King wasn’t a paragon of originality either, and the sequel has some twists and turns that probably wouldn’t have worked in the original’s Biblical/Hamlet inspired tale.

The voice talent is mostly intact, except that Rowan Atkinson no longer voices Zazu (and believe me, he’s much missed.) The new villain is just a female Scar without Scar’s sense of humour. I wonder why they didn’t have survive Lion King‘s final scene and make a comeback. When I was 10 and saw the ripped-to-shreds character Nuka, I misunderstood and thought that was exactly what they had done. As it is, Zira creates continuity problems. Where was she when the events of the first movie were happening?

Rafiki’s still in fine form, and Nala and Kovu are good characters. We don’t have the very typical scenario of the main character being the least interesting part of the movie, which is fortunate – some of Disney’s legit theater-released movies can’t say the same. The characterisation is good enough that the real stick-the-knife-in-and-twist scenes in the second half of the movie come off well, and are suitably moving.

In 1932, Walt Disney released a short called Three Little Pigs. The short proved unexpectedly popular, with audiences identifying with the pigs and reviling the wolf (who they saw as symbolic of The Great Depression). Disney banged out several more shorts, and when none of them created the original’s sensation did he is said to have remarked “you can’t follow pigs with pigs.” Maybe not, but you can certainly follow lions with lions, and this movie is proof.