The Silver Coin returns! In “The Diner,” James Tynion IV joins Michael Walsh for a story about Jean, a waitress working at a struggling diner who bites off more than she can chew. With colors by Toni Marie Griffin (with Michael Walsh) and backup story by Adam Gorham.
Mark Turetsky: Ritesh, it has been a while since we’ve sat down to review an issue of The Silver Coin. I assume there have been no major upheavals in your life since March?
Ritesh Babu: Well, Mark. I can safely say I’ve discovered no trace of any potentially sentient and shady silver coins in my vicinity. So that’s a positive. I’m not sure these things would keep coming out if that were to change.
Mark: So I’ve read a lot of James Tynion IV’s horror comics: The Nice House on the Lake, Department of Truth, Something is Killing the Children, The Closet. He’s carved out a nice niche for himself in the indie horror space. A lot of his work relies on certain images: the monster in the closet, the terror of a child at the unknown. This piece, though, doesn’t. It’s much more grounded in realism.
Ritesh: It is! Though it still plays on certain primal images, I think. Food and horror is such a classic matchup. This takes it to basically a zombified extreme and becomes about consumption, the endless hunger, the rapacious appetite of constant consumption that destroys and reduces you to something less than human. Something animalistic and predatory that lives only to consume and consume, over and over, regardless of what it is that it’s consuming. The act is all that matters. Consumption for consumption’s sake.
Mark: And it’s tied to that other side of the capitalism ouroboros: growth. It’s there in the McDonald’s analog that’s been installed right next door, even though there was already one “down the road in Temple Bay.” And they’re here to consume this unlucky diner’s customer base. But eventually, that hunger consumes all that it can before it has to be turned onto something else. Enter: cannibalism.
Ritesh: Yeah, it opening on a McDonalds stand-in is telling. The hyper-expansion of these fast food franchises, which almost never stops, and how they take business and money away from the local places. And then we see the desire to compete and win against the damn food franchise at their own game, the desire to “beat” them, but what we get is the inevitable horrific endpoint of such a desire. There’s no “winning” here.
Mark: Let’s take a bit of a step back for a moment, just to place the issue in the context of the overall series. This is the start of the third set of stories, and on the whole, they don’t have much connective tissue between them, save the coin. This issue, though, serves as a bridge between the first and third issues. The man who leaves the coin as a tip for Jean is Louis, the firefighter who finds the coin at the end of issue #1 in 1978. The next time we see him is in 1986, a full eight years later. He gets murdered during a home invasion, but that leaves a whole big chunk of time where it seems like the coin isn’t up to much. Here, though, we learn a bit about what Louis and the coin got up to while they were together. He experiments with the coin, and almost certainly the coin is using him. But, this being a good anthology series, it really doesn’t matter if you’ve read any other issues. What did you think about the Louis element, not having read those other issues?
Ritesh: It didn’t detract at all for me! I just went along with it, and the not knowing was just intriguing and added to the uncertainty and horror, I think. It added to the flavor of the book. This clearly has serialized threads like the one you just caught, but I do so adore that I can just read this on its own and have fun with it. It’s something I wish more comics could do, and do more often. I can just pick up any issue and read, and it’s a complete story, and it rules. It was great to see Tynion’s particular take on this, his approach to the model of The Silver Coin thus far.
Mark: It would have been so easy to just have the coin left as a tip and leave it at that. But I agree, he adds a second malevolent presence to the comic in addition to the coin. It’s also a bit funny how Tynion teases us with Betsy, the younger waitress reading a paperback of Stephen King’s Carrie. With many of the coin’s victims dying in fire, and Jean’s repeatedly telling Betsy to grab the tip, Tynion seems to be misdirecting the reader into thinking we’ll be getting a Carrie situation at the end of the issue, but instead it’s a Delicatessen one. It’s almost a shame that the cover image spoils that misdirect, though it is eye-catchingly gory.
Ritesh: The suggestion helps build that delicate dread, as it gets you wondering and thinking about what it is we’re about to witness. At this juncture, Tynion’s gotten very good at nailing an issue of horror comics, so he knows what he’s doing here. What’s going to forever stick with me though is the repeating motif of those close-up panels of people eating. The sight of just mouths and teeth and ketchup, it’s like that scene in the final Lord of the Rings film wherein Denethor’s eating and it’s gross and messy and repulsive, but times 100. That regular act of eating is turned into an act of gross horror until by the end you have bloody zombies. Something banal made something so terrifying.
Mark: And the way it all comes together on that one page, where Betsy is freaking out on the left side of the page, and it’s four tiers, but the right side is just eating, eating, eating and it’s six tiers. Something about the mismatch of tiers just really turns up the upsettingness. It reminds me of the opening scene of Ravenous, a film about cannibalism directed by Antonia Bird, who was vegetarian. Bird makes a bunch of men eating steaks viscerally upsetting in a similar way to what Walsh does here. And the thing is, it’s just close-ups of people eating at this point. There’s no cannibalism going on (yet), but they tap into something primal here. The transfiguration of our mouths, the seat of much of our communication, into a biological shredder and devourer of meat.
Ugh.
Ritesh: And the SFX that go along with it. The crunching, the biting, all the GULP, SLRP and HRFF etched in red, it gives it a texture that is haunting. Like, I read the issue, and it’s not the stabbing scenes that scare me. It’s not the murders. Those are common, those are expected and everywhere. Walsh is very good at doing it, but it’s not what sticks in my mind. It’s instead scenes like the tier of eating panels you just mentioned. That’s far more horrifying and evokes way more discomfort for me.
Mark: Finally, let’s talk about the Adam Gorham backup, “Dark Passage.” On my end, I found it a bit jarring (though not unwelcome) to have an art style so different from Walsh’s tackling The Silver Coin. Still, I’m glad that Walsh is opening his world up to other artists.
Ritesh: I LOVED the stylistic shift. It’s so moody and striking. I’m a black-and-white comics nut, so this was just right up my alley. The lettering was also just really fitting for what this was doing. I’m glad to see this is a serial, and am curious where this heads. Definitely glad Walsh is expanding like this and letting folks on board to add to the tapestry.
Mark: Ritesh, it’s always a pleasure. Even if we’re discussing gross shit.
Mark Turetsky
Ritesh Babu is a comics history nut who spends far too much time writing about weird stuff and cosmic nonsense.
