The Silver Coin #13 // Review
An iconic little piece of change has been paraded around through quite a few different eras over the past year or so. It’s been to the colonial east coast. It’s served in World War II. In The Silver Coin #13, the cursed little disc finds its way to the end of a millennium as writer Johnnie Christmas fills readers in on where the coin was the evening of December 31st, 1999. Artist Michael Walsh welcomes readers to the murky horror of a New Year’s Eve on the edge of the 21st century. The coin falls into the path of an expectant mother at the end of one era and the beginning of another.
July of 1999 was nice. Brett and Karena were really excited for the future. They were pregnant. They were a young couple. It was going to be their first. Things can get pretty complicated in the course of half a year. Brett’s not certain the baby is his. Karena might be alone. She’s yelling at him from a payphone on New Year’s Eve...December 31st, 1999. She’s angry. She’s about to give birth. A cursed coin comes out of the pay phone. Lost somewhere in anger, she grabs hold of it. As the calendar begins to birth a whole new era, Karena might birth more than just a child.
Christmas cleverly taps into the horror of beginnings, endings, birth, and death. The brevity of a one-shot comic amplifies the abstract nature of the horror that Christmas is exploring. Brett and Karena aren’t given a whole lot of background, but they don’t need it. Issue 13 isn’t a character-driven one. Christmas’s supernatural horror springs from childbirth and the dark innocence of childhood in a way that feels a hell of a lot more power than one might expect from the genre. All too often, supernatural horror is just...kinda cool in an epic fantasy sort of a fashion. It doesn’t actually reach into the darkness to disturb on a deeper psychological level. With Issue 13, Christmas finds spectral horror breathing in the shadows of the subconscious.
The ongoing story of the Silver Coin continues to swim through the darkness of Walsh’s heavy ink. Big gloopy globs of darkness fill the nightmare world of a woman giving birth on a couple of different levels. The earthbound world of a lonely phone booth and a hospital delivery room is delivered to the page in the same darkness as the nightmare hell in which Karena is confronted by the darkness that may be lurking within her. The thick, inky ambiguity of Walsh’s ink work serves the story well. There are strange mutations of child and fetus in an inky hell. With more precise detail, it all would have run the risk of looking like something out of the twisted nightmares of a sleeping anatomy textbook.
The world of Silver Coin gets a bit more defined at the end of the issue. There DOES seem to be some movement towards a potential finale for the cursed disc. It seems so insignificant next to everything that it’s mixed up in...so most people wouldn’t think to connect it with the horrors it ushers into the world, but Walsh and company have the potential to reach for a larger world which could result in the heroic showdown against the forces of the coin at some point in the future.
