In The Silver Coin #10, a sequel 300 years in the making. Audrey is a high schooler with an unusual ability who’s drawn to the occult. When she encounters the coin, she conducts a ritual meant to break its curse but instead summons something darker still. The coin’s mystery deepens in Part Two of “Covenant,” written, drawn and colored by Michael Walsh, with color assists by Toni Marie Griffin and a backup story by Aditya Bidikar.
Mark Turetsky: Hey, Ritesh, I’m glad you could make it to my summoning circle. Have a seat right there and let’s get this thing started.
Ritesh Babu: Thank you, Mark! I’m rather ready for the ritual to begin.
Witch Continuity
Mark: We’ve made it another five issues, which means this is our Walsh solo issue, heavy on lore, but maybe not so much on the social commentary we’ve been getting for the bulk of this arc.
Ritesh: Yeah! It very much exists to kinda put a cap on this wave of issues and close things out, this “phase” of The Silver Coin, leading into the next.
Mark: And it shares part of its title with the last solo Walsh issue, #5: “Covenant.” You still haven’t read that one, have you?
Ritesh: Nope! I could go back and do it, and I suspect I will in trade eventually. But given it is an anthology, I thought, “I’m just gonna read through and try and make sense of it.” And I think it more or less works. It’s very much in the mold of your typical horror story. So even with all the lore and all that, it does sort of play the same, it has a very familiar rhythm. And Walsh’s cartooning is just so naturally easy to read and follow. So it worked totally fine for me. Now Mark, as someone who’s read it all, what was your experience like?
Mark: Just to briefly sum it up: Back in colonial times, a witchfinder comes to a small Massachusetts town and finds a witch, Rebekah Goode. He gets her best friend to bear witness against her and arrests her. He pays the best friend with some silver coins, and Rebekah sees her friend holding the coin as she’s being executed, and with her dying breath curses the coin to bring “horrors unimaginable.” So we get something of the origin of the coin in that issue. This has some familiar beats from that first “Covenant” story. It gives us some more about the nature of the coin. It’s not just cursed, it’s possessed by a demon, and the souls of all the people it’s consumed, including Rebekah Goode and the witchfinder.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. At its core, this comic tells the story of some early-2000s teens doing some dumb teen shit, summoning some bad stuff that kills most of them. In that sense, it’s a very successful issue.
Teens: Not Even Once.
Ritesh: Ahaha, yeah. It’s just a bunch of kids getting high and then getting involved in a weird ritual, and then the monster arrives. Thus follows the terror, followed by murder for survival. And then the escape. Classic haunted house horror stuff. But it’s done well. I REALLY love the way Walsh letters those unbound captions, etched over the images. It just fits so well and sets the perfect tone. It’s one of those things where it all blends seamlessly and you’re reminded, “Oh right, this is a cartoonist at work. They’re doing all of it themselves at once, of course it all fits just right.” The issue has a beautiful balance emergent of that.
Mark: It’s a really beautiful issue in that. I love, too, the light blue for the soul of Rebekah Goode’s word balloons. It gives a hint of that silver of the glow of the coin. The pops of red in panels of extreme violence and the muddy reds of the blood in the ritual. I also want to particularly call out a really effective page turn: Our protagonist for this issue, Audrey, follows the crow, and we turn the page to the horror of the previous holder of the coin. It’s an unfortunate soul whose body seems to have been overtaken by plants, their skull a silent scream of vines coming out. It’s so attention-grabbing that it takes a second to see the spirit of Rebekah Goode floating behind it. Really great stuff. I don’t think we’ve got any hints as to who this person was. I wonder if its appearance will be an enduring mystery (like Alien’s space jockey before 2012) or if it’s teasing a future issue (like Alien’s space jockey after 2012).
Ritesh: Oooh, that’s a really good point. I definitely think there’s a lot here that’s going to come back to haunt us. Interesting though that while the coin sinks away into the ocean, lost like the The One Ring from Isildur (There is a lot of that in here, isn’t there? The corruptive artifact that no soul can resist, a curse that just cannot be stopped), the seeming next story cuts from here to the 1970s, with James Tynion IV coming on board.
Mark: We get something of a bittersweet ending to this one, of a sort. Rebekah Goode is able to escape the coin, but her crow familiar is still bound to it, and Audrey manages to become a successful final girl and survives the whole thing. She’s joined by her seeming familiar, Randall, and unlike at the beginning of the issue, she can’t understand Randall’s chirps. Sort of like Kiki and Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service. But they’re alive, and the coin is gone, although we know it’s not for good, as we’ve got it returning in “Unrighteous Instruments,” the 2007-set Aditya Bidikar short story at the end of this issue (and it’s also around in the far future of issue #4). What did you make of the short story at the end?
A Coda
Ritesh: I’m glad you brought that up! I really enjoyed it. Dare I say, I dug it even more than the main story. I was surprised by how well it set a tone and kept it through the end. The sort of mood it evoked really stayed with me a good bit after I finished. It felt like I’d suddenly just read two great issues of The Silver Coin somehow. How’d you find it?
Mark: I thought it was super effective! From a storytelling standpoint, Bidikar does a great job with the format of the interview transcript. They use the reader’s knowledge of what the coin does and create a great swerve with the story by the end. You think it’s going to play out one way and of course it ends in horror, but not the way you expect. And from a wider metanarrative perspective, you see how the legend of the coin is spreading in the world at large, especially with the influence of internet bulletin boards. Really good stuff.
Ritesh: Yeah, the weird online cult-esque stuff the story alluded to as a notion, I was like, “Ooh yeah, that works and makes sense actually.” I was almost waiting for the story to make an NFT connection at that point. Now, that didn’t happen, but let’s be real: NFT cultists are absolutely the kind of folks who’d end up scrambling to kill each other over greed as The Silver Coin watches.
On the whole, in just two pages, it proved really effective. This sort of thing can be either a hit or a miss. Rarely is it in between. So I’m glad this hit.
Mark: Bite your tongue, Ritesh! The Silver Coin does not need to be funged.
Loose Change
- The “Thank you, Mother” farewell panel, with the creature just being the black of the page, that’s one hell of a panel. Striking. It’ll stick with me.
- Likewise, the panel layout when the witchfinder attacks and kills Elle flows beautifully.
- So much of this issue has to do with naming: spirits, animals, demons. Names are power.
Mark Turetsky
Ritesh Babu is a comics history nut who spends far too much time writing about weird stuff and cosmic nonsense.
