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…