Thunder Roadis heading from cellphones to the bigger screen. Last summer, uclick released Thunder Road, the first U.S. comic created specifically for cellphones. Now the company is preparing to bring cellphone comics to the Internet.
Harold Sipe, uclick’s manager of mobile product development, expects the first chapter of Thunder Road to be available online in November, with a full rollout of the new platform planned for 2008. “What we’re working on is a cross platform where you would have your account and you could view [the comic] on the Internet or view it on your phone,” he told PWCW.
Uclick is the digital arm of Andrews McMeel Universal, which syndicates such popular strips as Garfield and Doonesbury through its Universal Press Syndicate division. Over the past year, uclick has signed deals to publish properties as diverse as Jeff Smith’s Bone, Tokyopop manga and the Islamic-themed comic The 99 on mobile phones.
Sipe says uclick’s reader will “optimize” the comics so the experience is similar to reading them on a cellphone. “We want to be able to publish to as broad a platform as possible,” he said. “That is growing out of this archive we have created for viewing on cellphones. Now we can expand that to make it viewable on the Internet, so with a subscription, you are able to view it either way.”
This may seem like an odd goal, but Thunder Road writer Sean Demory and artist Steven Sanders say that cellphones are a unique interface. “In theory, you are using a small space, but if you can move the frame around, then the space is only as small as you want it to be,” said Demory. “We are dealing with a lot of panoramic, sweeping images, but we have a lot of small stuff happening, so every time the frame moves, you have part of the story being told.”
Writing for the small screen is leaner than writing for print, Demory said. “There is not room for much in the way of exposition,” he said. “Everything has to be active. I go out of my way to avoid talking heads whenever I can.”
Demory describes Thunder Road as “Road Warrior meets Dr. Strangelove.” Set in a postapocalyptic world that has been ravaged by decades of “low-grade nuclear war,” the story is muscular and action-packed. His summary: “There is a thing, guy goes after the thing, people try to stop guy from going after the thing, stuff blows up.”
Sanders converts existing comics to cellphone format for uclick’s consumer side, GoComics, so he is already familiar with the medium. “The biggest advantage in creating a comic directly for the cell phone, instead of converting an existing print comic, is there is going to be zero wasted screen space,” he said. Creatively arranged panels and figures that break the boundaries are difficult to fit into the rectangle of a cellphone screen.
On the other hand, as Sanders learned when he converted his own art for Five Fists of Science to cellphone format, shrinking a comic doesn’t seem to hurt the art. “Whenever you reduce it to that size, even though you lose the detail itself, it seems to blur into something the brain and the eye are able to translate into a recognizable form,” he said.
Thunder Roaddebuted in July and ran for eight weeks; the complete comic is still available. The company has plans for another original comic in 2008. “I think once we move to this Internet product, it really opens it up,” Sipe added.
