I can't say this forcefully enough. Thunder Road kicks an ass. Twice.
I'm glad that my first foray into comics was as big and free-wheeling as this one was. After all, it's a book that's got a car chase running through the entire second half of the story. This is a comic where the cyberpunky MacGuffin isn't a military grade intrusion program that blah blah wheeze whatever. This is a comic where the MacGuffin is a NUCLEAR BOMB made of NUCLEAR BOMBS that flies at supersonic speed thanks to a rocket fueled by blowing up NUCLEAR BOMBS.
Thunder Road is definitely a cyberpunk-style action-adventure thing, but I had the chance to pull my chrome from Detroit rather than Tokyo. The characters are all there, whether you're dealing with the vet on the make, the shadowy corporate operative or the sultry, cybered-up femme fatale. That being said, the femme fatale wasn't a slender Asian with elegant, minimal cyberware but, rather, a curvy Berliner with a clunky Soviet surplus cyberarm who inspired brilliant artist Steven Sanders (
geigertube around these parts) to claim our tagline should've been "Thunder Road: What Robert Crumb will be rubbing one off to in 2007." (Keep in mind that this is a woman who's got "I never lift anything heavier than a wine glass or a cock" tattooed on her back in German. I read about a Russian mobster's girlfriend who had that tattoed on her stomach and fell in love with the poetry of the phrase.) The vet on the make wasn't the survivor of a thousand black ops gone bad but a mechanized infantryman who'd done a forced march from Siberia to Calais, kicking and taking all the way. And say what you will, this guy is definitely not a whisper-silent corporate ninja:
Even the side-characters are fantastically bad-ass. My favorite scene in the book is a three-panel throwaway thing involving a family in the midst of the unceasing car chase. As bullets fly, the cute little girl in the backseat shrugs into her kevlar safety blanket and helmet as if to say "Alright, bitch. It's go time" before she resumes her road-trip game of slug-bug while her parents begin defensive driving.
Oh, and did I mention the art? Did I mention the chaingun with a chainsaw motor running it? What about the tank made of tanks? The cars? The wonderful character design, including a cameo by Comicdom's It Family, Matt Fraction, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Henry Leo "H-Dawg" DeFraction? The fact that every machine Steven drew made perfect sense and was fun to see in action?
Seriously. And they let me get away with it. Nobody questioned a comic that included drug use, drinking and driving, copious amounts of violence, child endangerment, cults and rockabilly music. Sanders didn't slap me in the face when I said "I want a tank. Made out of tanks. We'll use it for five panels. Go!" At least 5,000 people thought it was worth reading every issue (making it one of the most-read things GoComics has ever put out there,) and the checks keep clearing. It's a comic where images like this were seen as fitting the limit of "what you'd see at 9 p.m. on an action-adventure TV show":
This is a comic where this is seen as an acceptable coda:
Goddamn, y'all. Goddamn.
This was a gateway comic for me in the purest Reefer Madness sense of the term. Nothing good can come of this much freedom. Nothing at all.
Which is my way of saying that I just sent a pitch to Adult Swim and we're pursuing print options. I've got other stuff in the hopper, but I'll be beating this drum for a few minutes more.
