Sellswords was originally conceived in 2004 as an animated project about 4 mercenaries who botched a heist. It was originally developed by Robert Jones with help from fellow UMBC students Brenton Snyder and Brian Arnold. Although the animated project was fully storyboarded and scripted, it was never completed. After several (largely unsuccessful) attempts by Robert to bring that story into comic book form, he decided to enlist the help of fellow UMBC alum Jon Bernhardt to give the story new life. Jon wrote up a script in late 2006, and by early 2008, they were finally ready to take the comic to the web.
At its core, Sellswords is a four-part comic about a group of mercenaries living in pseudo-medieval times. The main characters are Cassius, Corinth, David, and James, who you can read about on the "Characters" page of the site. The comic updates every Sunday, but is best read in 3+ page chunks. We'd like to update more, but the time constraints of our professional lives have limited us to producing one page per week visually.
Sellswords.com was designed by Nic Takemoto and Robert Jones and engineered by professional web developer Greg Chiasson.
Three days ago, local kingpin Molloch hired Cassius, Corinth, and David to steal a certain emblem from the study of a duchy manor outside the city. Two days ago, those men hired Darius, a veteran cat burgler, to help them in their task. Yesterday, the four men cased the manor. Tonight, everything went wrong. They're back at Molloch's. The cat burgler's dead. The emblem's still safe in the study. A sellsword's job is always complicated, bad, and getting worse.
Robert Jones has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He works as a business analyst for Lotame Solutions, Inc. and is responsible for all of the art for Sellswords. He occasionally posts sketches and doodles to his other site, Electro Bert Jones.
email: robert@sellswords.com
Jonathan Bernhardt is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who lives, works, and writes outside of Baltimore, MD. He is an occasional contributer to FunnyBookBabylon. Sellswords is his second comics project; he also wrote the short story "Josh & Imp" with artist Diana Nock, which is published at her site.
email: jonathan@sellswords.com
Nic Takemoto is the designer who made this site so pretty. He works at LMD Agency and has a pretty site called Lucky Finch. He lives in Brunswick, MD and has strong opinions about Humus.
Greg Chiasson is a Web Engineer at OmniTI Computer Consulting. He lives and works in New York City, where he wrote all the code for this site. He runs a fairly terrible blog where he posts his photography and random musings, called Failure Cascade.