By CLAYTON PARK

When you're a small business competing against corporate giants, it helps if you can be stronger than a locomotive, leap tall buildings in a single bound and run faster than a speeding bullet.

If you can't do any of the above, it helps if you can be creative.

But that's hardly an attribute one normally associates with banks, even a community bank like Frontier Bank, an Everett-based chain whose branches include one in Lake City.

That's why my hat's off to Frontier for taking an unusual approach with an advertising campaign it launched at the beginning of the year: a series of comic-strip-style ads featuring a caped crusader called ... Superbanker.

It's an advertising gimmick, yes, but as a one-time aspiring cartoonist myself, I've got to admit - I think it's kind of cool.

So I recently called up Frontier's head of marketing, Barbara McCarthy, to find out how in the name of Great Caesar's Ghost this Superbanker came to be.

McCarthy confessed that Superbanker is her bank's way of creating something offbeat like Washington Mutual's popular Rodeo Grandmas campaign, but on a shoestring budget.

To pull it off, McCarthy resorted to something Frontier had never done before. She hired an outside ad agency.

McCarthy set up a meeting with Dave Remer of the Seattle ad agency Bondo & Remer who suggested several ideas, all presented on fancy storyboards. Each was quickly rejected by McCarthy, whose disappointment was beginning to grow. Down to his final pitch, Remer opened his briefcase and produced a plain piece of paper bearing a couple of sketches of a superhero with an F emblem on his chest resembling the logo for Frontier Bank. Thus was born Superbanker.

"I started to get excited," said McCarthy, who immediately responded, "Look at all the things we can do to merchandise this: sweatshirts, pens, keyrings..."

Having agreed upon a concept for the ad campaign, McCarthy and Remer hired the services of former Seattle-area cartoonist extraordinaire, Mark Zingarelli, who now lives in Connecticut. (Some readers might recall that Zingarelli did a popular series of restaurant reviews-in-the-form of cartoons called "Eating Out with Eddie" for The Rocket back in the '80s.)

McCarthy and Remer then set about their next challenge: coming up with storylines for Superbanker episodes that could serve as entertaining action-adventures while also describing Frontier's banking services.

"Banking products aren't all that exciting," admits McCarthy, who nevertheless has managed to come up with nearly a dozen tories to date, including one in which Superbanker battles bank clones, and another (to be published next month) where he battles a Y2K monster bug.

The result has been resoundingly positive, both from customers and from bank employees. "We've had some of our guys who will come by my office and pull back their sports jackets and yell 'Superbanker!'" said McCarthy.

She has also had bank execs approach her with ideas for future Superbanker adventures.

And here in North Seattle, employees of Frontier's Lake City branch recently held a Superbanker Day in which they all came to work dressed up in homemade Superbanker outfits, complete with capes, tights and Superbanker T-shirts.

Bankers having fun? Now that's a novel concept.