“You know what.”

 “Yeah?” “What if… what will you do if the world turns like the movie we saw?”

 “Well… I will run to you then, I think.”

 

Line 1 is serialized from September 7, 2013 to February 23, 2015. It’s quite surprising since I remember the time I was with this webtoon’s start like yesterday. Usually, in disaster movies or comics, they all describes how the disaster is came to happen by giving 20~30% or even half of the space as if they want to prove the reliability of their data for some point. On the contrary, Line 1 deals with more deeply on cruelty of people and psychological change by situations, rather than the route or the process how the virus is infected to people. 

A new pathogen which appears to be a new flu virus increases the number of the infected in Busan, and total infection rate on Korean population goes over 60%. But the route of the infection is yet to be revealed, and the authority predicts the infection rate will go over 80% in 24 hours in line with this trend. From the last news, the cellular signal, the Internet, and the television are all cut off. No one walks by in the streets. Only the protagonist is there, in the hollow city.

Other than people risking their life to steal food and others trying to kill them for their stolen food, the protagonist sees no one. He accidently discovers a canned tuna in the middle of the chaos of thieves running away with food, and he heads to nearby supermarket with the tuna can. He encounters two strangers, an old couple, and the couple pleads for his mercy and runs away, leaving a cereal box for him they were carrying.

He thinks awhile that he will go behind if he does not change, as the world is changing this way, while regretting that he tried to pick up the cereal box for the moment. The scene he brings back the tuna can to the place he picked up, when he leaves for Hyejung after getting her call, means a lot as he moved into an action not only thinking to himself. The one small but big step in an attempt to save his human dignity is an important belief that penetrates this whole webtoon.

 

The protagonist gets in danger of being robbed of his bag or gets beaten by people.

He meets a homeless man, who invites the protagonist to his hiding place. He says: “Actually… a homeless like me doesn’t feel a difference from the world like this. I’m lonely as same as I was before.”

To some degree, it is understandable that people become violent and kill other people, since the instinct for own survival is the basic human desire. Of course, I’m not talking that such violence is justified for it’s a desire. However, with the contrast of the scene people killing each other to have more, being obsessed to possess the things they have enjoyed so far, and the appearance of the homeless man, it makes us think again about the human morality; it is not a thing we can mention without certain seriousness. Only the poorest man helped the other, and that’s the irony.

It seems the situation in Line 1 is somewhat similar to what the people fled North Korea told. The most common thing happening in the country is hunger and starvation. In particular, when you’re dragged to a concentration camp, you see a mountain of corpses and parents eating their children. They also say some people make living by selling human meat to a black market.

Most people said that the parents are unacceptable and eating human meat is wrong. But there’s a thing we aren’t aware of: a person cannot understand the other if the person was not in the other’s shoes. How can one discuss the philosophy or the human dignity while the one is not suffering from hunger and not shivering with cold? The people are suffering from endless life in the camp and a routine of violence and torture in there. Even if the people who are suffering from the unimaginable hunger eat human meat, for we have not been in the situation of the basic instinct coming first than the reason, we can’t judge as they’re wrong for our common sense.

In such crazy world where prioritizing the basic instinct is not strange at all, the protagonist who trying to keep the baseline as a human meets many people in his road following Subway Line 1 and he gets much information as well. Despite the work overall seems dark and desperate, I think the protagonist alone in the process is meaningful enough in this webtoon.

Some said the reason why a person can remain as a human is the person perceives and acts, unlike an animal. If we’re living in the world like that in Line 1, could we say, in our dying breath, that we kept our human dignity or tried out best to keep it?

The protagonist has a blue eye, like odd eyes, due to his immunity to the virus. In the changed world, in the desperate situations, he walks Line 1, hoping to reach his girlfriend Hyejung, who lives near Mangwolsa station on Subway Line 1.