Silver Coin #2 // Review
Artist Michael Walsh continues his dance with the shadows in the second issue of the horror anthology title The Silver Coin. This time the story that Walsh is rendering comes courtesy of writer Kelly Thompson. While the first issue had been more of a complicated story of a cursed silver coin's involvement in the rise and fall of a Ziggy Stardust kind of anti-hero, Thompson's story feels much more like a straight-ahead slasher horror story. While its novel to see traditional horror brought to the page, there doesn't seem to be enough plot to fill an entire issue for the coin's second outing.
Fiona's watching a movie before heading out to summer camp. The movie she's watching? It appears to be an analog to the original Friday the 13th movie. Judging from the face that she appears to be watching it on VHS and has posters from Sonic Youth and Nirvana, she's a teenage horror buff from the 1990s. She's a bit upset to find that her summer camp looks a lot more wholesome than Camp Crystal Lake in the movies...that is until mean girls make her run away to a cabin outside of camp that happens to house a certain cursed coin...
Thompson seems to be taking great pleasure in drawing a story straight out of a slasher movie. All the standard conventions of slasher horror cinema are there. She's trusting Walsh to find a way to make that interesting on the page, which is actually very respectable of her. With the script to the second issue, she's giving Walsh a really solid horror foundation with details that are capable of being sculpted into something really interesting. The fact that the story itself doesn't actually have a lot going on doesn't seem to be the problem.
Walsh does a solid job of telling Thompson's story. Fiona's a nice girl; she's got an appeal about her. The reader feels her disappointment at camp. The darkness of the mean girls doesn't feel over-amplified in any way. It's all very straightforward. And then the horror starts to emerge. The horror is rendered without a sense of the shock or detail that it really needs to jump off the page. The artists of Crime SuspenStories, Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, and the rest of the EC comics of the 1950s were brilliant with this sort of thing. There ARE some striking moments here, including an ax attack in silhouette, but the horror largely lacks impact aside from the initial visual. When a severed head pierced through the eye sockets with arrows hits the top of page 18 like a placid canoe in the water at the bottom of page 8, something's definitely missing.
It's gruesome, and it's fun. Thompson manages something relatively deep thematically about the horror that we carry with us everywhere we go. A story that would have felt much more concise in an old horror anthology of the 1950s feels a bit long in a full-length contemporary comic book.
Grade: B
