“The Silver Coin” #1 documents the perils of found objects, rock ‘n roll dreams and some occult twists. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Cover by Michael Walsh
Written by Chip Zdarsky
Illustrated & Lettered by Michael Walsh
Eisner-winning artist MICHAEL WALSH (Star Wars, Black Hammer/Justice League) teams with an all-star lineup of collaborators-CHIP ZDARSKY (STILLWATER), KELLY THOMPSON (Sabrina the Teenage Witch), ED BRISSON (Old Man Logan), and JEFF LEMIRE (GIDEON FALLS)-on a new horror anthology miniseries for mature readers. Each issue will tell a tale of terror in a shared supernatural world. The story starts in 1978 with a failing rock band whose fortune suddenly changes when they find the mysterious Silver Coin. Little do they know that fame comes with a cost, and a curse is always hungry.
“The Silver Coin” #1 is a new, anthology-style comic created by Michael Walsh, Ed Brisson, Jeff Lemire, Kelly Thompson and Chip Zdarsky. Issue #1 features “The Ticket,” a story about a small-town band with a big rock sound in the disco era. Ryan and his buddies find a mysterious lucky coin left behind by his mom in a box of junk, and their fortunes change for the better. So it would seem.
Zdarsky and Walsh understand the formula for a good horror one-shot, but spend too much time getting to a satisfying level of drama. There’s almost too much build-up to the more sinister elements of the story, though Walsh’s themed color palette and loose, inky details set a good nighttime club mood. Zdarsky puts in good work to make Ryan driven, unlikeable and full of rage, while his bandmates seem content to play the 7-o’clock bar spot, smoke weed and hang out in their small town forever. Plot-wise, Ryan’s abrupt turn toward disco and success at any cost seems a bit out of character given how he’d doubled down on his convictions with the agent moments before, but we’ve only got a few pages to spare before the final gruesome set piece, and limited space to have him hem and haw over his decision. We could have saved some time by milling around less in Ryan’s backstory and keeping the tension focused on his ambitions, but those choices don’t sink the issue by any means.
Zdarsky balances dialogue and narration reasonably well, though Walsh places a few pieces of narration on the page that get lost at the bottom of panels or are easily skippable when reading intuitively. We don’t have any narrative boxes to guide us, but they wouldn’t fit the book’s aesthetic so they’re not a great workaround. There’s also some unnecessary length in the narration given the diary/confessional style, and as the source document isn’t present as a literal object in the narrative, there’s less leeway to clutter the page with personal reflection and flavor. Still, Walsh’s lettering is scratchy, organic and suitable to both the time period and the genre.
What works best in “The Silver Coin” are its sinister visuals, and Walsh captures the moody purples and reds of seedy bar-scapes. There are a few single-panel color transitions that don’t always work, but one in-panel detail as a character moves from the club interior to the grim, grey alley exterior features a peek at the previous page’s palette through the curtain separating the physical spaces. It’s a small focal point that works well as a visual and narrative switch simultaneously. As Ryan talks to the agent and explodes at his suggestion, it’s clear we’ve left the warm, emotional height of the book behind and are on our way to an inevitable bad end.
Walsh also toys with symmetry in layouts, largely by undermining it for sinister effect, and the page featuring the split panel of Ryan examining the coin on his bed is a perfect example of intentional imbalance. The page might work for some and not for others, but the final four-panel strip featuring a white background transitioning to a nearly all-black close-up shot of Ryan’s face is unsettling, and denies us visual closure. The doubling of the first image and the repetition of the two panels in the next strip demand a balanced ending, and Walsh doesn’t give it to us. There are four panels to close out the page, true, but our eye keeps dragging back across the strip to the first panel, and on the initial page turn it’s also easy to drop immediately to that glaring white box. It grates in a good way, and forces us to pause on the drop of blood hitting the coin. The raven framing Ryan’s head is a bit much, especially as there’s no return to that particular motif, but the overall page is balanced – and unbalanced – well.
Continued belowHorror is a hard sell in comics because it’s nearly impossible to pace as effectively as in film. Film’s inherently linear, and we can’t skip around on the page to put together our own interpretation of a story. Walsh and Zdarsky solve for this issue by keeping the story simple and delivering a cataclysm at the end that not only fuses the previous color notes, but delivers some gore and a set-up for the next issue. We land here a bit shakily given Ryan’s abrupt heel turn and disco ambitions, but the scene functions well enough and there’s a bit of EC-style physical grotesquerie to entertain us to the end.
Overall, “The Silver Coin” #1 is entertaining and a solid piece of work. It may lack a certain snappy quality that’s critical to legendary horror shorts, but it builds mood and delivers a satisfactory conclusion. Zdarsky and Walsh set up a good first jaunt in this shared universe, and the story is intriguing enough to see who’s about to pick up the coin next and if its thirst for blood carries over to a different era, and new nightmare.
Final Verdict: 7/10 – “The Silver Coin” #1 delivers a solid first entry in this anthology horror series, with just a few rough edges.
