The Silver Coin #14 // Review
In its first 13 issues, The Silver Coin has tracked the cursed title object through nightmare visions of World War II, the 1980s, and, most recently, the night of December 31st, 1999. With its fourteenth issue, writer Pornsak Pichetshote tells a tale of 2020 with the aid of artist Michael Walsh. Things weren’t going particularly well for Darren and Lauren when the year began. The COVID outbreak and a host of other problems are complicated by the presence of a certain tiny, silver disc. One of the less sophisticated plots that the series has dealt with since it began, this is a slightly enjoyable fusion of the now with various elements that have shot through the series up to this point.
December of 2020 finds screenwriter Darren in a rough position as he remembers the events of the year with his girlfriend, Lauren. Darren arrives home to find a startling surprise. There’s a wild-haired figure on his bed wearing a mask...over his eyes. One of them appears to be falling out of its socket, which is the least of Darren’s problems as the figure launches itself at the screenwriter with a bloody hatchet. Darren will have to face a lot about the nature of safety, health, and just how protected someone can be with an ever-evolving mass of information shifting around beneath the mask that may be his only sense of security. There’s a madness lurking around the edges of Darren’s apartment. The presence of the Silver Coin will only make things worse.
Pichetshote plays with madness in a way that doesn’t quite engage with the pandemic on a deep enough level to be truly insightful. The trappings of COVID lurk around the surface of a story about a single man and his passage through one of the roughest years in recent memory. The weird fusion of different elements from previous issues is echoed as the screenwriter has something like a nervous breakdown. It’s fun, but it’s not terribly engaging. Anxieties and tensions from the dawn of COVID serve as superficial surface tensions for a two-dimensional tale of madness.
The nightmares of a screenwriter serve as a pleasant, little launching point for Walsh. Exploration into the iconography from the past 13 issues allows Walsh some time to reflect on previous moods and emotions, from the specter of an old priest from the colonial witch-hunt to the apron of a man hacking-up customers in a 20th-century diner and more. The strangely hypnotic pattern of heavy inks bursts out against white-open stretches of faded, garish color. The visual reality of blood and viscera would be a lot more intense if the detail was just a bit more precise, but there’s no question that Walsh knows what he’s doing with the gloopy dripping ooziness of the ink.
With an opportunity to look back on everything that he’s done before, Walsh can start to move ahead a bit. There are so many eras that have yet to be explored with the Silver Coin. The success of the series will allow more of the coin’s history to catch the light of future issues. And an issue like the 14th allows the series to look back on itself, which provides some perspective, but it can only afford to do so very sparingly if it’s going to continue to build momentum through the weird patchwork of history.
