Frank Baron, NSO #1 - The NSO
This is the first page of Frank Baron, NSO, which first appeared on the interwebs back in April on www.drunkduck.com. Frank made his print debut back in 2004 in www.thegatewayonline.ca, but only lasted a semester as I quickly realized that a serialized story wasn’t very effective when combined with The Gateway’s comics schedule (most artists only appear once a week, and even then that’s only once you’ve established yourself). Rent-A-Thug would debut with the Rules For Criminal Success series the following semester and become exponentially more successful by shedding continuity and replacing it with done-in-one joke strips.
Frank Baron, NSO was created in 2004 when I decided that I wanted to draw for The Gateway but didn’t really have any sort of concept. My first idea was a serialized fantasy story about an orc and a severed head that had been magically animated (which I still find to be an entertaining concept), but it required a pretty significant amount of room to look as cool as I wanted it to, and room was something that the comics section didn’t have much of.
The idea for the comic came more specifcally from watching The Punisher (the Thomas Jane one) DVD’s special feature about the evolution of the comic series. Part of that feature mentioned the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD series and all of a sudden I started trying to come up with equally cool titles. Frank Baron, NSO was the result. After that I started crafting a world of spies, terrorists, and government agencies in which would play out action-movie ultraviolence and a bunch of other things that I like to draw. The original strip series included a lot more political commentary (which was pretty heavy-handed and not all that funny, although I’m sure the raving socialists that inexplicably crowd university campuses would have approved). The newer incarnation of the series, which was resurrected in March-ish of 2007, was intended to be presented as webcomic but would focus more on action and dark comedy.
Okay, this is turning out to be a really long-winded post, so I’m going to wrap up here. Frank’s little corner of rentathugcomics.com has a lot of work to be done before it’s up to par with Rent-A-Thug but it should be a fun ride. Thanks for reading!