The Silver Coin #9 // Review
He's a cop who is being commended. He's being recognized as a hero for saving a life, but that's not the full story. He's done awful things that he just might get away with. (So many others under the badge do.) He's a lucky guy, but his luck is about to run out with cursed currency in The Silver Coin #9. Writer Vita Ayala brings another story of an unlucky coin to the page, assisted by artist Michael Walsh, who is assisted in colors by Toni Marie Griffin. The overall rhythm and shadow of the story feel like a classic story out of EC's Tales from the Crypt.
There's a police detective in the Bronx somewhere in the '70s or '80s. So many apartment complexes are up in flames as shady people make crooked deals in high places. The Detective is somewhere in the middle of the food chain. He's in danger of becoming a victim himself until he happens across the Silver Coin. Suddenly, he's recognized as a hero for saving a girl's life in a burning building. They don't know that he was the one who started the first in the first place. Luck has a tendency of flipping over, though. There's a coin in his pocket that might complicate things.
Ayala slinks into the darkness in a meticulously laid-out story in a series of scenes that all build beautifully on each other. The Detective is just the right kind of scum to come across as an appealing anti-hero who is both ugly and relatable as chance and circumstance conspire to twist him through an ugly series of events. There's no question what is going to happen to him, but Ayala makes it fun to find out with plot twists that all seem to hit the page at just the right time. The story may be kind of cliched in conception and delivery, but it all feels so very narratively comfortable.
The art fits the story like a glove. Okay...so it's a leather glove that smells like blood and gasoline, but it fits. The dark shadows that Walsh coats the page with are contrasted against the radiance of so many fires that are brought to the page with the aid of Griffin. The globby murkiness of Walsh's inks fit the page in the dreamy miasma of a nightmare that might have felt a bit more sinister with more precise detail. It's a wet slap of a visual horror that deserves a bit more of a dry look to really combust. That said--the seedy mood is carried quite well in the visuals from cover to cover.
Salomée Luce-Antoinette closes out the issue with an illustration of a burning building in the Bronx. The "Bronx is Burning" afterword lends some poetic historical perspective on the era in which the story is set. It's a classy addition that gives the story an appealingly dark substance that goes beyond page and panel. It would be really cool to see this sort of thing become a regular feature at the end of every issue.
