Southern Bastards #1

"Here Was a Man," Part One
written by Jason Aaron
art by Jason Latour

It's quite possible that the twisted personality of Craw County, Alabama, can be summed up by its welcome sign.

"WELCOME TO CRAW COUNTY
Home of the 5-time State 4A Football Champion Runnin' Rebs" (Southern Bastards #1: 3)

Craw County is impressive in a middling division, and decisively proud of it.  Football is king, and the high school coach, who doubles as local drug lord and crime boss, is the shadowy, ethereal emperor that lords over Craw County with generations of former players as his thuggish acolytes.  In his conspicuous absence he is all the more menacing and prodigious, as yet unseen but whose effects are ubiquitous.  Likewise, Earl Tubb is an aging legend, once the star defensive end for the Runnin' Rebels, an Odysseus come home.

Southern Bastards bristles with all the tense, laconic brutality of an Eastwood western and all the sinister nihilism of a crime noir.  The moral footing is slippery and shifting, disorienting but intriguingly so.  There's beauty here, but a terrible, dangerous beauty, a beauty without moral grace or kindness.  Aaron and Latour's Craw County is a mythical landscape of beasts and heroes with little to distinguish the two.  It's also a story peppered and pregnant with a dark history.

Earl Tubb returns to his hometown to clear out his ailing uncle's house.  Though he insists it could take no longer than three days, there's an inevitability to Craw County's magnetism over him, a gravity he may not be able to escape twice.  The center of that personal black hole is his father, former Sheriff Bertrand Tubb, now dead 40 years, a man whose professional reputation prominently featured a bludgeoning club signed by famous football stars.  From what little can be gleaned from the opening issue, history has lauded Bert Tubb as an unflinching savior, who single-handedly defended his home from a mob of armed attackers, and if the cover is anything to judge by, the football field as well.  Earl's memory of his father, however, seems a little more spotted.

It may be a little difficult to imagine—especially for the numerous reviewers of Southern Bastards, those who by their own admission have never set foot in the South—but Southern Bastards is a love letter, of sorts.  It's an eloquent and equally dissonant ode to Southern poetry and Southern violence and the uncomfortably thin veil between them.  It's not about realism; it's about the wild expressionism of a hostile and strange land, a culture that imagines mythical, praetorian lawmen and feels in metaphors.  Ultimately, Latour, in his very fine epistolary epilogue, says it best:

"So this book is for THEM.  The assholes you might think Southerners are.  The ones we're afraid we might really be.  This book is designed to bury them sons of bitches.  To spit on their graves.  Because I fucking hate those bastards with every part of me.

Because I love The South with all I've got."  (30)