1703 ( )

The first half (Vol 1) was very good, and I loved it. Unfortunately, this second half let me down.

Honestly, I believe majority of the disappointment can be laid at the feet of artist CP Smith. I really really don't like his style of art, especially after coming off the set up that Ben Templesmith did in Volume 1.

But the other issue I had was, for Straczynski to show the reader all the set up that he'd accomplished in the first half, he had to revisit a lot of those pages again and, in between, give us pages and pages and pages of explanation, which ground the forward momentum to a halt.

So, for me, it just didn't work all that well. Too bad. ( )

I always start out reading JMS comics wondering why I'm doing this to myself, given that every one seems to be about an angsty guy whose wife got fridged, and then three-quarters of the way through the grey morality kicks in and I remember why. This is a classic JMS comic in this mode, made even better by the stunning art by Ben Templesmith and C.P. Smith. ( )

Straczynski is an author with a ton of promise whose books are this close to perfect but not quite there yet. Ten Grand is leaps and bounds ahead of Midnight Children, his earlier title. That book suffered from rushed, uneven pacing, a problem largely solved here. Ten Grand is comfortably self-contained; the narrative neither feels like it's leaving too much out nor trying to cram too much in.

That said, the second title suffers from an overabundance of recap and exposition. I can't fault Straczynski for wanting all the readers he can get, but he would have been better served by trusting them to go back to the start of the story instead of hammering the previous developments over readers' heads with each new chapter.

That said, he takes several well-worn noir and theological elements and ties them together in a way that feels fresh, and the art is first rate and often breathtaking. For all its faults, Ten Grand is still far better than most of its peers.