Story Overview:

The Line is a graphic novel about a man, Jonas Fairclough, who gets trapped in the interstices of the bureaucratic machine after he is mistakenly accused of owing money to the phone company, Vizion. A careless accident by the distracted Vizion secretary Jinny plunges Fairclough into a world of customer dis-service, characterized by indolent operators, interminable lines, re-routed calls, and
on-holds. Soon, Vizion imposes punitive measures—it cuts his land line, cancels his cell phone, sends threatening messages peppered with unpleasant words and phrases such as "delinquent account," "failure to comply," "bad credit rating," "mortgage risk" and "bankruptcy." Jonas Fairclough is a loving family man who puts his wife and daughter above all else. He lives in the suburbs of a large city where he owns and runs a small bookstore. As he sets off on his journey to prove his innocence, Fairclough finds himself far away from his family and his bookstore. The further he goes, the more absurd his surroundings become. He enters a fantastic world of creatures, machines and bureaucracy. Day after day
he stands in line, first this one, then that one, before he is bounced somewhere else. He is videotaped by machines and ignored by humans. Men in long overcoats flip through the files in his bookstore. While no one can get his name right (Mr. Jones? Julius?), everyone seems to have him pegged—a number in a complex identification system of social security numbers and other data. Life comes and goes while he stands in line—Jinny begins to date her boss; the woman one line over gives birth to a son, while an old woman ahead dies of a heart attack and is pushed to the side by those behind her. Fairclough's family despairs at his disappearance. The graphic novel humorously depicts the escalating strangeness of Fairclough's experience—the sweeter the canned language ("we are here to serve you!) and the happier the smiling faces on the Vizion's ads, the greater the disjunction between lived reality and the corporate spin. With humor, this book highlights the outer and inner landscape of contemporary corporate society taken to its extreme—the grotesque, amoral, alienated apparatus which most people (‘customers’) rely on daily, and the inner emotional turmoil (frustration, rage, sense of helplessness) of those who are its victims. 

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