The Fourth

To gain riches beyond your wildest dreams, more loot than you could possibly spend… isn’t that the goal of any pirate?

…And then what?

Heir of Silverskull
Coming July 12th, 2021
Updating Mondays and Fridays

A message from Courtney:

Ahoy!!!

I’ve been bursting with excitement to talk about this for weeks, and not doing a great job of keeping it totally secret. Well, here we finally are! The project itself is not launching for a month, but in the meantime you can read all the info below. If you missed our tenth anniversary update, you can check that out on the previous page. Or, I’ll just sum up this point again: while The Fourth is still taking a nap, we’re making a new comic! No, I’M making a new comic!

Congrats to everyone who managed to guess at the subject matter; to be fair, I wasn’t exactly subtle recently. Piracy in the age of sail is probably my biggest historical and fictional interest, and I’ve studied it extensively- enough to know what fictional tropes weren’t really a thing in our reality, and to want to play with them anyway. While I got a massive amount of enjoyment out of The Fourth’s pirate adventure (where I handled a larger-than-usual portion of the writing myself), it wasn’t quite enough for me. Goldgills and his crew have stuck with me in my heart for this past almost-decade; knowing he was likely never going to come back into the main story, my heart mourned him and I always wondered if I should just start drawing him for fun, maybe telling his own little tales for people to enjoy. Last month, when Victor asked me if I wanted to make my own story set in the world of Idenau that wasn’t going to conflict with the main plot, I literally did not have to think at all about what I wanted it to be. And since then, I’ve been in a dizzy haze, writing the whole thing out in my head.

A big goal of mine is to make this story enjoyable on its own merits. Of course reading The Fourth (and certain encyclopedia entries) would help to provide context and background, but I want this comic to be approachable for all fans of pirates out there who want to jump right in. And of course, if they end up enjoying their time in Idenau, there’s plenty more for them to check out!

Here are a few points of interest about Heir of Silverskull, and feel free to ask any more questions in the comments below. I’ll answer what I can without giving too much away!
-It’s a Courtney solo project! As I mentioned in our previous update, Victor’s not really in a position to continue the main comic right now, and I wanted to do something all on my own. He of course gets credit for co-creating Idenau and all the species and worldbuilding therein; I’ll be running stuff by him to make sure everything fits within the can(n)on we’ve created, and he’s giving me some general storytelling advice as well. But the plot and dialogue are all written by yours truly this time, so address any complaints about the excessive pirate speak to me here in the comments.
-I’m planning for it to be about as long as Chapter Zero; with two updates a week, it should run for about a year. We’ll see how carried away I get, though!
-We always considered the main comic to be a “comedy-adventure”, but Heir will lean a bit heavier on the adventure. We try to put a punchline on just about every page of The Fourth, but this comic will have a different tone and flow to it, and trying to follow that structure would really weigh it down. So please, don’t feel bad if you can’t figure out what’s funny about the end of each page, because it’s probably nothing. That said, I’ll still try to put in humor such as I can, whether it’s in expressions and character interactions, or some slightly goofier and parodical piratical elements. (In other words: I am not as funny as Victor but I will do my best to make you smile!!)
-Due to the way the site works, it’s going to be hosted right here on the main page, in the middle of The Fourth’s archives. However, we’re working on a way to jump back to the beginning of this story from any page within the chapter, and when the whole thing is finished we’ll likely move it.

It’s been a joy to write and plan for Goldgills; still a villain in his own way, but with his heart not so deeply buried as Skärva’s; in fact it’s pretty much on his sleeve at all times. Impulsive and a bit ruthless in his piratey ways, he’s also a sweetie, bursting at the gills (har har) with enthusiasm- he’s the part in me, and maybe you, that longs for constant adventure, for the harsh beauty and boundless mystery of the sea. I hope you enjoy sailing with him. This is very much a passion project for me; I want it to sound like waves and seagulls and feel like sand and taste like salt and smell like the ocean. So come check it out when it launches on July 12th. Until then, I’ll be responding to people here, and you can follow my twitter for updates, or join my patreon where I’m about to unleash a bunch of concept art you can see for only a dollar a month!

(If you read all this way, here’s a treat: clockwise from Goldgills, his crew’s names are Bones, Cinder, Louis and Wings! ….the Commodore is also there.)

At any rate, I hope to see you around here soon, and can’t wait to start sharing this story with you all.
…Mateys.