A Month of Webcomics – The Line

All throughout May, I’ll spotlight a different web comic. Like with the month of independent comics and the month of LGBT comics, I figure I will let you web comic creators out there suggest your comic for spotlight during this month. So if you want me to spotlight your comic, drop me a line at bcronin@comicbookresources.com!

Today we look at Kevin Church and Paul Salvi’s new strip, The Line, about the dysfunctional staff at a restaurant.

The Line shares a universe with Church’s long-running strip, The Rack (about a comic book shop). In fact, the main protagonist of The Line is Linda Park, sister of Lydia Park (one of the most popular characters from The Rack – so popular that she even had her own spin-off strip for awhile!).

Linda is our POV character into the strange world of The Line. She was hired in a particularly amusing fashion…

However strange her hiring was, this could be a big break for Linda, seeing as how this is the first job she’s had in food service where she didn’t have to wear a hat. So she’s willing to put up with a lot, and a lot is just what happens to her.

First off, as you can see from the above strip, Paul Salvi is doing a dynamite job on the artwork for this strip. Here’s another example of his skills both as a storyteller and with facial expressions…

See what I mean? Not only does he tell the story well, but he does a bang-up job of conveying the precise mood of each character, just by their expressions.

And that’s very important for this strip, as Church’s humor in this strip is very character-driven, so being able to convey emotions is key.

The way the strip has worked so far (it’s still a very new strip, we’re talking something like 20 strips so far) is to place the characters within a strange, frantic situation and then just watch as they deal with it all. The humor comes from seeing just how the various characters deal with things. One of the wackier situations is the discovery by PETA that prior to the chickens being chopped up to serve in the restaurant…well….

How PETA discovers this is quite amusing in and of itself.

The strip just today caught up with the scene I showed you above (the “seven hours later” panel), so it will be very interesting to see where things go from here.

You can follow The Line here.