The Fourth

Hey friends! Not sure if anyone will read this, but allow me to take a detour below to talk about VIDEO GAMES! (It’ll tie back into the comic at the end, I promise.)

Since starting Heir of Silverskull, a number of great games have come out that I’ve recommended to you, because they’re very important to me and my inspirations. Psychonauts 2, the Paper Mario: TTYD remake, probably some other stuff. However, last month I received a game which is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best (and most important to me personally) game I have played in the ENTIRE FOURTEEN YEARS of this website’s existence.

Victor and I are both huge Zelda fans, but him moreso than me, and most of The Fourth’s direct Zelda inspiration came from him. My favorite game series? It’s Donkey Kong. It has always been Donkey Kong. If you’ve known me a long time, particularly outside of this comic, you probably know that already. In many ways, Heir of Silverskull is just me trying to pay tribute to, and thank, my eternal favorite game: Donkey Kong Country 2. But actually, The Fourth wouldn’t exist either without certain inspirations I took from the DK series (among lots of other things) which initially inspired me to want to build out this random dream I had into a story, recruiting my at-the-time-new boyfriend as an equal partner in the endeavor. The main impetus for my fascination with villains as a tiny child comes from Donkey Kong Country, later supplemented by stuff like Super Paper Mario. But DKC was the core, the root, the source, you might say.

The DK series has, unfortunately, had something of a complicated and unsettled history after Rare (its shepherd in the SNES/N64 era) was sold to Microsoft over two decades ago. And to put it simply, while there have been some great games in the franchise since then, most of them eschewed a lot of the specific elements that had made me fall in love with the series as a child, that shaped my interests, and that made my imagination into what it is today.

But, without getting into spoilers too much, I can tell you: Donkey Kong Bananza brought it ALL back. The series has once again become, fully and with no caveats, part of the story that I’ve loved since I was a child.

On top of all that, it’s simply a fantastic game that is endlessly fun to explore and play and goof around in. If you were on the fence about getting it, and if you find yourself in possession of a Switch 2, I truly truly truly cannot recommend it enough. It is now sitting comfortably as my second favorite game of all time. Every little detail and moment of this game is a masterwork of design, made with respect and thought and love and passion.

…Anyway. I really did want to work on HoS a lot this summer, but my brain kind of needed a reset to comprehend all of this. It’s not just every year that you get THE game that your heart has been awaiting for most of your life, but given up on actually happening; the kind of game that is beyond your wildest fanfic-tier dreams. However, now that the dust is settling a little bit, I can safely say that I’m more inspired than I’ve been since the early days of working on this comic. My muse came back to me, and with him – I mean, uh, with my muse – comes the remembrance of why I wanted to create stuff and tell stories about villains and pirates in the first place. The world has been unbelievably kind to me this time, and I want to keep paying my inspirations forward, in whatever small ways I can.

So, hey. I’ll see you soon. And I’ll see you again and again until this story is done, and then hopefully Lord Skärva, who has a cape and sharp teeth and a messed up eye for absolutely no reasons related to any other villain who went missing from the world for a long time, will see you too.

-Courtney