Review By: Sergio Porras Ten Grand is starting to make me a sucker for a good love story. Sick and twisted love story, but love story none the less. Issue #3 was a strong follow up to issue #2 which ended with the death of Debbie and Joe where he was left to question if he was working for the right people and whether or not Laura was really in a safe place.
Joe visits the county morgue after Debbie was possessed and jumped off of her apartment building. Ready for a double dose of irony? The whole time that Joe has been out looking for Sarah, Debbie's supposedly missing sister; she has been at the morgue in a body bag cold and dead after being hit by a bus. The story took a really eerie turn here because Joe is able to find the soul's echo to tell a bit of what happened leading up to the moments of death and when I read the dialogue between joe and Sarah's dead body it kind of gave me the chills. I know exactly what will be going through my mind the next time I'm in the presence of a dead body... No I'm not a creep; it’s just a part of my job.
We get to dive a little deeper into how Joe met Laura and how their love came to be and it really is a romantic story. Even if you were to read this story and think awful things about it because of demonic possession, and the gruesome artwork, I guarantee you that you would end up rooting for Joe in the end just based off of his love for Laura. Issue three wraps up with Joe's greatest fears possibly being true, is Laura really safe?
Ben Templesmith's art took me a few reads through issues one and two to really become adjusted to but it really deserves high praise for what it is. I promise that reader will get their monies worth from the art department around pages sixteen and on. Not that the rest of the issue is bad but that part of the artwork tells a story of its own.
By far the best thing about Ten Grand is that every issue has a setup and a payoff. If you read my reviews on the site then you probably know that I can only take so much build up before I get really impatient, I guess you can blame that on my untreated ADD, but every issue of Ten Grand is almost like reading a "day in the life of Joe Fitzgerald" sort of premise that just happens to lead nicely into the next issue. Not too many series are batting a thousand in my pull list but I'm glad to say that Ten Grand is one of them.
Score: 5/5
Writer: J. Michael Stracynski
Artist: Ben Templesmith
Publisher: Image Comics and Joe's Comics
Price: $2.99
Release Date: 7/3/13