Denise Mina makes her mark on 'Dragon Tattoo' world

• First 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' graphic novel out Nov. 13
• Denise Mina emphasizes Scandinavian culture in adaptation
• Some aspects of story work better in a graphic novel than a movie, writer says

Denise Mina couldn't help a little of herself filtering into the adventures of Lisbeth Salander.

Mina, the Scottish writer of DC/Vertigo Comics' graphic-novel adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, found she had included a few of her own jokes in the first volume.

In his novel, the late Swedish author never called an obnoxious old lady a "Nancy Spungen" — a reference to the girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious.

"When I read it, I cringed a wee bit," Mina says. "I was always striving to keep myself out of things, but it just gets in there.

"People will think because it's a best seller, people just see this as a rubbish book. Actually it's not. It's a pretty brilliant book. It's got fantastic characters in it and really great things to say, so it was an homage to Larsson, really."

The novel has spawned two hit movies — one from Sweden and an American version directed by David Fincher — and makes its way to comics, with a pair of graphic novels by Mina and artists Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti.

The first volume arrives in comic shops and bookstores Nov. 13, with the second book slated to release next year.

As in its other permutations, the graphic novel follows both the enigmatic and talented young hacker Lisbeth as well as Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced magazine journalist hired to find out what happened to the great niece of a wealthy Swedish businessman 40 years ago.

Mina first read Dragon Tattoo for entertainment, and fell — as many around the world have — for Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) in the Swedish film and Rooney Mara in Fincher's version. However, when Mina started adapting she found the tale involving revenge fantasy and corporate fraud to be deeper than she originally thought.

"When you actually sit down with it, it's got loads of stuff in there about corporate responsibility and loads of stuff about Gothic Sweden vs. modern urban Sweden," Mina says.

She also explores the many facets of Lisbeth and the tattooed and pierced girl's relationship with others, such as the creepy lawyer who's assigned to be her guardian when her previous one has a stroke. After he rapes her, Lisbeth returns to his house to even the score, the sequence where Mina's first volume ends.

"I think what she's avenging is her mother being a victim of domestic abuse," Mina says. "That she goes back and attacks him because she's been damaged by being battered and that's her defining motive."

It was the obvious split point, although it meant that in the first volume her two main characters never meet — they team up in the second half of Dragon Tattoo to solve the mystery of Harriet Vanger and the identity of a killer of women.

"That's the point where you really get to know (Lisbeth)," Mina says. "As well as being the dramatic high point, it was a point where the character really flourishes."

Mina also developed a fondness for Blomkvist, who cuts a different figure from Daniel Craig in Fincher's Dragon Tattoo. "He is kind of a slightly pudgy middle-aged guy on the turn, which works much better," the writer says of the character, who was based on a boy detective created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.

"This is a man who's had a big humiliating thing happen to him at what should be the professional high point of his life. If you think of him as this kid detective and has this fairly black-and-white attitude toward morality and he's faced with a serious of ethical dilemmas, he becomes much more sympathetic."

Tackling Dragon Tattoo was more of an "editing job," says Mina, who's contracted to adapt the other books in Larsson's "Millennium" series: The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. She went chapter by chapter, making notes of what happened in each and cut out the parts that broke up the narrative.

Mina, who once lived in Berggren, Sweden, also found parts of the book where she could insert the parts of Sweden she finds fascinating, such as including "really bizarre and marzipan-heavy" sweets that are part of the seasonal cake culture, the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, and snus, a smokeless tobacco product.

"I think they're tumor-inducers but you can really get off your face on them. And they sell them everywhere!" says Mina, an ex-smoker herself.

Most of Mina's work has been in the crime-fiction world — her new novel Gods and Beasts is out in February — but she's spent a good amount of time in comics, penning Hellblazer issues and the graphic novel A Sickness in the Family for Vertigo.

Dragon Tattoo lends itself to comics well because it's a story that's visual and has aspects that movies just can't do as well, the writer says, such as the fraud story line and character motivation.

"Hopefully we've done something slightly different with it. I wouldn't say it has more depth, but a different form and actually the things that come out that didn't come in the movie are because of the form."

Ask her why The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Larsson's other books are such a massive success story, selling more than 25 million copies worldwide, and Mina's less sure.

"That's why publishing is in the mess it's in. None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read," she says with a laugh. The British version of the TV show The Office "was so big over here, and I think The Office was massive because everybody kept telling each other to watch it, and people with no sense of humor were watching it.

"There's always these giant baffling books, like The Da Vinci Code. People say it's not as well written as Midnight's Children. Why aren't people reading Midnight's Children? Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great."