Coach Boss grows even more desperate as his criminal empire and football championship hopes are both in danger of crumbling around his teeny little ankles. Minor spoilers follow below.
Written by Jason Aaron
Illustrated by Jason Latour“GUT CHECK,” Part Two Things get bloody as Coach Boss is forced to expand his criminal dealings to keep control of the football season.
One of my favorite moments in Jason Aaron’s comics came pretty early on in his career, pretty early on in his “Ghost Rider” run. Four vehicles propelled by four people who hate and/or want to kill each other are all headed at full speed toward the same intersection in a splash final page cliffhanger. Since then, Aaron has continued excel at bringing characters towards inevitable conflict. Sometimes this happens at top speed, and sometimes, like in “Southern Bastards”, he’s happy to take his time. Much like “Scalped,” this is a book that is meticulously setting up pieces, placing characters, and escalating conflicts, all through a series of distinct and artfully portrayed individual scenes.
This story is part two of “Gut Check,” ostensibly the storyline in which Coach Boss and the daughter of the man he murdered, Roberta Tubb, finally come face to face. That confrontation started in earnest basically on the last page of the fourth issue. 12 issues (and a bit more than 12 months) later, these two are only smidge closer to finally meeting up, but I don’t find myself minding it too much. Aaron and artist Jason Latour have spent those issues slowly filling in the world of Craw County and its Alabama neighbors. In issue 16, Coach Boss’ Running Rebs are set to square off against the Locust Fork Super Bolts after two straight losses. Even as his criminal empire is spinning out of his control, the thing he fears the most is another loss. It’s that desperation that drives Boss to invade the home of the Super Bolts’ star player with intent to injure and prevent him from playing in the big game.
What could have easily been a hacky sequence of southern crime, turns into a confrontation a different sort. Theron, the Super Bolts’ All-State bound star, spent his childhood looking up to Coach Boss, who he now discovers to be nothing but a thug and a cheater. Boss, naturally, doesn’t take kindly to these accusations. It’s a pivotal conversation, as Boss tries to justify his actions and Theron rightly calls him on his hypocrisy. Things go wrong, and violent, but it’s this moment that echoes through the rest of the issue. The series has spent a lot of pages on Coach Boss’ motivations and the compromises that he’s made to keep his head above water. His interactions with Theron show that even if he ends up coming out of things on top, he will never be able to regain what one suspects he was always after: respect from his town and the players they love.
It’s this kind of focus, on the things you can reveal about a character when they’re challenged to own up to their weaknesses and failings, that help elevate the story being told as circumstance drives its plot forward.
The other thing that elevates any given issue of “Southern Bastards” is the one-of-a-kind art and color work of Jason Latour. A cartoonist with an incredible ability for expression, Latour makes sure the book looks like nothing else on the stands. I’m hard pressed to even say what artists helped him develop his style. A hint of Jack Davis in the caricatured proportions? Walt Simonson in the angles of his lines? Any attempt to pin down a lineage feels like it’s falling short. His art takes on another dimension on this book, since he colors it himself. The overall palette is muted throughout, but bold. Maroons, browns, and the book’s signature red and yellow are featured throughout, and every deviation to something brighter pops right off the page. Latour also thrives on the addition of the strange amidst the mundane, whether it’s the Zubaz pants on Boss’ thug Esaw Goings or the car driving monkey introduced in this issue. Even as Latour infuses characters and settings with jagged detail, he’s also not afraid of spare line work, rending a set of headlights in one panel with two simple swirls built of one line each. Jared K. Fletcher’s lettering, as usual, blends in seamlessly with an art style where that kind of compatibility is essential. All these elements come together to create vibrant and expressionistic pages.
Continued belowTogether, Aaron and Latour are excellent at building a compelling story from panel to panel. Staging, color, composition; everything works in service to the narrative tone of the series, building a very clean and contained 20-odd pages.
The end of the issue doesn’t necessarily bring Roberta and Coach Boss much closer, but it does show us how much Boss is capable of losing, whether it’s on the field or off. The story also subtly keeps the ghost of Earl Tubb (Roberta’s father, murdered by Coach Boss) haunting the story as Boss carries out his acts of intimidation and thuggery with the stick he stole from Earl and used to kill him.
It’s a common refrain when it comes to Coach Boss. Whether it was Big, the assistant coach who Boss literally can’t win a game without, or the stick he stole from a man who murdered, Euless Boss has always had trouble getting things down under his own steam, but he’s heading towards a moment, and a very angry woman, where he’s likely going to have to stand on his own.
Final Verdict: 8.4 – Another beautifully rendered issue that tells a contained story that also drives the plot forward with a stark tone of tragic inevitability.
