A silent, rural, two-lane road. A woman in a car on mission. A lifetime of things unspoken hanging thick in the air. And a palpable sense of loss.

Combustible ingredients, to be sure, but in the hands of Emi Gennis, they become Baseline Blvd, a short, clean-lined, visually and emotionally austere book about a journey to a place, sure, but also to a place within where few would dare to go. Where, perhaps, even fewer would come back from.

Okay, yeah, I said the ingredients here were combustible, but this is no Molotov of a comic — rather, Gennis sets things on a slow-burn simmer from the outset, and as flashbacks creep in and the scope and nature of what’s compelling our protagonist forward make themselves known, we realize we are following one raw, frayed, threadbare nerve all the way from point A to point B, and that those points don’t just exist in three-dimensional, physical space, but in chronological space, the past both affecting and infecting the present, and threatening to cast a permanent pall over the future. Closure is what’s needed, but can such a thing ever really occur between a person who’s still living — and one who’s dead?

Complicating matters is the question of whether or not the deceased individual is someone with whom you wanted to “make peace,” or someone who richly deserved a good telling-off.And trust me when I say that the circumstances of said individual’s demise really don’t make things any easier here. But perhaps I’ve said too much already.

Fortunately for us all, Gennis is a whole lot better at this than I am. She says so much with so very little — as far as words are concerned. But her skilled use of geographic locales to both reflect and map out emotional terrain simultaneously is what those inclined toward effusive praise — and that includes me in this instance — would call “breathtaking.” Every panel on every page here is imbued with purpose, determination, and a kind of understated precision. Don’t let the surface-level idea that nothing much is “happening” here fool you — Gennis is teaching us all a vocabulary that goes well beyond the ability of mere language to communicate as she charts the hitherto-uncharted. Courtney Love challenged audiences to “live through this” — Gennis aims to show us how that’s done.

This book was part of Kilgore’s kickstarter last year but, the realities of crowd-funded publishing being what they are, I just got my copy a week ago. To say that Baseline Blvd was “worth the wait” would be a massive understatement — it’s a book that’s worth its weight in gold, that packs an emotive gut-punch like nobody’s business but does so in a manner that feels light as a feather. There’s no mistaking the fact that it comes from some deep well of lived experience, and that its creation very likely served as a means for the cartoonist herself to exorcise some particularly painful demons. Now that she’s said what desperately needed to be said, albeit to someone who’s no longer here to say it to, my hope is that the experience was a cathartic one for her. She’s crafted, no hyperbole or exaggeration, a comic for the ages here — but I doubt it’s one that she herself is in any hurry to re-visit. You most certainly will be, though.

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