Silver Coin #6 // Review
The name of the game is Horror Fighter 2x. It's a one-on-one fighting game from the early 1990s. A kid is having really, really bad luck with it until he finds a certain coin in a shopping mall wishing well. It's a lucky coin, but it's not the kind of luck he's looking for in The Silver Coin #6. The anthology series continues with a simple horror story written by Joshua Williamson. Art comes to the page courtesy of Michael Walsh. Once again, Silver Coin finds appeal in a primal tale of horror capably drawn from one cover to the other.
Somewhere around 1993, there's a kid who has been spending A LOT of time in a video arcade in the Eastville Mall. He's really, really into a horror-based fighting game. He's been dedicated to playing as Crow Reaper Man. The guy working the arcade tells him it's a weak character. With that style of game, though, it's really just a matter of finding the right technique. For the kid, the right technique involves a certain silver coin that improves his skills warps reality at the same time. Success in the game is going to cost him a lot more than a single token.
There's nothing terribly original in the premise, but Williamson solidly avoids cheesy horror cliches in constructing appealing horror for the comics page. Williamson lays out the story in an appealingly clean arc that gradually increases the tension. What starts off as a simple obsession becomes something altogether darker due to dark magic that mutates the reality of the game. To his credit, Williamson doesn't try to over-render the premise. He allows the vague creepiness of the premise to gradually expand into the kind of gory action that Walsh can really sink his teeth into.
The vast majority of the action takes place in a video arcade. Walsh handles everything from art to ink to color, so everything is balanced quite well. Walsh uses ink to bring out heavy shadow that is illuminated by the ghostly glow of the color. He allows the color to differentiate between the spectral world of Horror Fighter 2x and the shadowy earthbound reality of the video arcade. The gore of the game comes together with vivid reds popping out of a largely greyish-blue color palette. The kid is lost in the reality of the game even before he gets the cursed coin, so Walsh gives his world a faded, lifelessness in everything that isn't the gore and the game's repeated prompts to "FIGHT!"
The title artifact finally makes it to a video arcade. The horror of a single coin is going to find its natural habitat in a video arcade. The premise finds such a primal home there that any creative team would want to embellish on the idea a LOT more than Williamson and Walsh manage here. They don't try to reach for too much...knowing exactly what they're capable of putting into a simple 20-page one-shot story. There's a clever kind of mastery in that.
