World War III started on Christmas Eve, 1954 when the MacArthur administration ordered an A-bomb strike on Leningrad. It ended with a tense peace treaty signed aboard the locomotive-city Stalin 1 as it roared across the tundra. That peace lasted eight months, until a mushroom cloud appeared over Wichita and the first Mobile Expeditionary Force made its beachhead in Siberia, leaving the ground blackened under the wheels of their warcycles.

Fifty-three years and six World Wars later have turned the USSR into a network of switching stations from which locomotive-cities journey on rails to remain one step ahead of The Bomb. In the U.S., costal megalopali churn out war materiel to shovel into the Western Front of Siberia and the atomic battlefields of central Europe while the Information Superhighway keeps inventors, innovators and engineers plugged in and on the move, under the all-seeing eye of the enigmatic AI, BURMA-Shave.

The bomb-ravaged American Heartland has been largely left out of the equation, falling prey to unchecked corporate land-barons and motorcycle-riding, nazidope-smoking MEF veterans ravaging the wastes. Some small towns have become fortresses, while others have followed the Soviet model and taken to the road, with clans roaming from one corp-compound to the next. Route 66, Interstate 70 and a dozen other superhighways have become the new frontier, where fortunes can be made with grit, cunning and a steady hand.

Kansas City resident Sean Demory is a published poet and playwright. He's also a civil servant, an enthusiastic firearm owner who knows the make and model of Mad Max's Interceptor (1974 Ford Falcon, Australian manufacture) and spent his formative years on cross-country road trips between Alaska and the southeastern United States. He lists Apocalypse Now, White Line Fever, The Road Warrior and The Way of the Gun among his favorite movies.

People really should've seen this one coming.

Thunder Road is his first comic book.


Steven Sanders was born in 1974, in a suburb of Kansas City, MO. He was going to be an Electrical Engineer, but failed pre-calc, and went to art school instead, where he ran out of money and ended up leaving after a year an a half. So he taught himself thereafter.

He did work for the role playing game industry for a while, before meeting Matt Fraction and doing art duties on FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE. He also does storyboarding and ad work for a variety of companies. He's of the firm opinion that comics need to be made cheap and disposable entertainment again, and that digital is the way to go with this. Cue excitement for GoComics and THUNDER ROAD.

He keeps himself occupied in the time left after the art chores are finished by reading about how the brain and body work, and how to run your house on a one-cylinder diesel engine fueled by vegetable oil. Someday he will find a way to combine the two subjects in practical application, and will never be heard from again.

He keeps a poorly maintained website at studiosputnik.com .