The Silver Coin #5 // Review
In four issues, a single cursed disc of metal has been quite a few different places. As The Silver Coin reaches its fifth issue, writer/artist Micheal Walsh takes the coin back to its origins in colonial North America as a woman is accused of witchcraft in New England. Having just been nearly half a millennium into the future in the fourth issue, The Silver Coin rounds out its opening cycle with a story of an ancient evil in a bloody land of subjugation by powerful religious authority. Walsh sheds a little light on the shadowy beginnings of the coin.
Rebekah is struggling just like everyone else in New England. It's a difficult life for everyone in the colonies. There's a goat that's suffering from some kind of illness. Rebekah is contacted to help. She knows traditional magic. She performs a ritual to cure it, but this IS colonial New England, and there ARE those who would persecute her for dealing with old magic. A holy man offers her a silver coin to confess to consorting with the devil. Her magics, however, come from a place far older than the Christian devil, as he will soon find out.
Walsh has decided on a solidly American origin for the coin. The themes that he's working within this issue have been echoing around the horror genre since Poe, but Walsh manages his own unique spin on it that grabs a host of horror tropes and casts them in an interesting new direction. There's something in the coin's origin that could echo darkness from before its minting, but Walsh chooses to ground the coin's dawn in a very simple good-versus-evil story from somewhere around the 17th century, which is as good a place as any to start.
There's a really sharp fusion between script and panel, but Walsh has gone for a much more traditional look for the coin's origin than might have been attempted in more experimental hands. Walsh casts heavy shadows across the page. There's a very sinister appearance to just about everything on the page, which might have submerged the story in unintelligible murkiness. Walsh finds enough variation in the darkness, shadow, and blood to keep the visual reality of the coin's origin appealing enough to make an impact. Walsh and Toni Marie Griffin cast the heavy shadows in washed-out colors that add a bit of depth to the action.
The Silver Coin has gained quite an audience in the past several months. What had been planned as a five-issue anthology mini-series has been opened up into an open-ended engagement on the comics rack. There is great potential in the life of a single cursed coin that could be taken in all kinds of different directions by a host of different authors. There have been several writers announced for the next several issues. If success continues, it would be fascinating to see some really big-name horror writers pick up the coin and take it for a spin somewhere in the hazy march of time. Anything could happen to a cursed coin, given the right momentum.
