Silver Coin #10 // Review
Her friends call her Aud. She can talk to spirits and animals and things. She's just made friends with a raccoon. She's named it Randall. She's into horror. She's inviting her friends over to watch a movie. Plans change when a spirit contacts her about a cursed object in The Silver Coin #10. Series co-creator Michael Walsh writes and draws an issue that features color assistance from Toni Marie Griffin. There's also a stealthily engrossing, little piece of text-based flash fiction at issue's end by Aditya Bidikar. The coin's origin is given greater depth in the tight, little nightmare of a standalone issue.
It's the early 2000s. Aud is hanging out with her friends in the bleachers, having a cigarette. They're all going to get together after school to watch the latest Camp Killer movie. Aud's plans are sidetracked when a crow beckons her to follow it. (Animals talk to Aud.) She follows it into the forest behind the bleachers to find that a ghost needs her help. (The dead talk to Aud too.) The ghost wants Aud and her friends to free her from the silver coin. What could possibly go wrong? At issues end, there's an unrelated story from the same era. It takes the form of a transcript of an interview between a police sergeant and a special agent involving the investigation of a cult of the silver coin.
Once again, Walsh keeps it simple. Traditional horror tropes splash across the page in a predictable way. The story might be an echo of a million others that have reverberated through the history of horror. Still, Walsh finds a hauntingly perfect framing for a traditional cursed object story that keeps things interesting through the final panel. Bidikar's flash fiction dialogue at issue's end plays with assumptions in a provocative tale of a group of kids who form a cult that is spoken in odd corners online. A police sergeant is shaken. A special agent is looking for answers. All is not as it appears in an intriguing short.
Walsh doesn't need much to deliver a very precise mood and motion in the journey of the story. Walsh's globby ink work slides across the page in minimalist drama. The dreamy cascade of narrative flows from one panel to the next as Aud tries to help a woman trapped in a coin. It's remarkable how captivating emotions can be conjured from a few squiggles of ink in the service of a haunting drama. The color drapes everything in grays and purples with the occasional splash of red and the sickly manifestation of vapid greens and golds and yellows of daylight.
Wandering around in its nonlinearity, The Silver Coin has made its way to a past that's just over a decade old. The concept feels as compelling in the relative present as it had in the more distant past. The issue-ending fiction feels a bit more sophisticated than Walsh's piece, but there's an emotional resonance to what Walsh is putting down that's every bit as accomplished as Bidikar's piece.
