Alpha fade with createEmptyMovieClip

I having difficulty viewing the alpha fade for mc’s I’ve created with createEmptyMovieClip. In tracing the fade, I can watch it progress from 0 to 100, and the image finally appears when it hits 100.

The createEmptyMovieClip mc’s are a child of an actual empty movieclip on stage with the instance name of lMc. I use a for loop to create empty mc’s that are children of it. I then set the _alpha to zero for each child mc.

Then, I preload the images into the empty mc’s, and once loaded, I try to increase the alpha. Again, I can see the alpha increase, but it doesn’t show until it hits 100. Ideas?