Hello? It’s the end of the world calling

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Comic-Con International is undeniably one of the biggest comics events of the year. On the streets of San Diego this week, you’ll see impressive-looking banners depicting the mask of Iron Man, whom Robert Downey Jr. portrays in a forthcoming movie. Although you’ll find plenty of coverage at The Times’ blog for the convention, here at Jacket Copy one can’t help but report another interesting item about the ways that comic books--like traditional books of prose--are getting pushed and prodded into new technological formats. Sean Demory and Steven Sanders, creators of the comic book adventure ‘Thunder Road,’ are releasing their story, which presents a bleak alternative history of the modern world, in an unexpected way: completely, exclusively, on cellphones.

‘A lot of people just kind of want to fix the current [print comic book] industry,’ Sanders says in a recent interview. But while many are trying to ‘just get more readers to go along with the current system’ of comic books in print, he and Demory are hoping to attract fresher audiences by giving them a riveting story that they can enjoy on the go.

To read the story, cellphone users must press the right-left arrows on their phones to scroll through images from the story, which GoComics.com says is now available on all major carriers, including Cingular, Verizon and Sprint.

Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel ‘The Road,’ the story looks at the fanatical, desperate state of the world--and its survivors--after 50 years of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nick Owchar