The Silver Coin #8 // Review
A single cursed coin has been through a great deal throughout the first seven issues of Image Comics’ captivating anthology series. With the eighth issue, The Silver Coin makes its way to Wall Street in the 1960s, acquired in a large collection of junk. The Silver Coin’s value is as questionable as ever. It’s the easiest advice to take: don’t invest in the cursed. Everyone knows that. There’s always someone willing to take a chance, as writer Matthew Rosenberg explores in a story brought to the page by artist/series co-creator Micheal Walsh.
A gentleman works in an office building. He’s doing business with numbers. Stressed-out as hell, but he’s not necessarily willing to show it. There’s a janitor. Nice guy. Loves his family. They’re both living in the same grid until one of them runs across this coin. It’s a cursed relic, but who really believes in curses in this day and age? It’s 1968. There’s darkness flowing all over everything, and the worst parts of the world aren’t cursed by anything other than humanity. So maybe someone picks up the silver coin and finds out that maybe there IS something in the darkness...and maybe that darkness is attached to the coin.
Rosenberg does an incredible job of putting together a story of two extremes. The wealthy have their place. The poor have their place. It’s winter, and the snow won’t stop falling. Genuine connection seems to be happening around the edges of the narrative, but there’s bloody darkness that inhabits those margins as well. All the action seems to be filtering through nine-panel pages. Occasionally there’s a big splash page. There’s blood or gravity. And then the prison of the narrative grid returns. It’s dark stuff that plays with an intriguing experimental format.
Walsh’s ink-heavy style brings the nine-panel page to life. This is easily one of the darkest issues in the series physically and emotionally. Everything is so cramped and covered with snow, blood, and darkness. It’s all so tight...even outside the building. The eleventh issue of The Silver Coin isn’t a pleasant place to be, but the clutter of narrative on every page makes for one hell of a reading experience. The heavy ink is accompanied by drab, muted color that coats everything amidst the speckled white of so much snow in New York in the winter of 1968.
The claustrophobic darkness. The prison of a grid. The blood and the snow. This might be one of the better issues of the whole series. The horror here is far from some dark fantasy with fantastic visuals, but the prison of nine-panel pages inhabited by so much ink and darkness...it’s a very vivid mood that Rosenberg and Walsh are putting to the page. It’s kind of overwhelming on so many different levels. The perfect horror comic for the dead of winter. The Silver Coin conjures a particularly haunting nightmare for the beginning of 2022.
