When I finished reading “Southern Bastards” #4, I was speechless. Coach Boss had, seemingly, gotten away with murder, and there were no real consequences to his actions. I could not imagine there being anything that could have made me sympathize with the Coach – I hated him.
And then I read the arc collected in ‘Gridiron.’ And while I still don’t like him, I feel I understand the bastard.
Written by Jason Aaron
Illustrated by Jason LatourThe hit new crime series SOUTHERN BASTARDS returns for its second volume, as JASON AARON (Scalped, Thor, Star Wars) and JASON LATOUR (Spider-Gwen, Loose Ends) pull back the curtain on the dark and seedy history of Craw County and its most famous and feared resident, the high school football coach turned backwoods crime lord Euless Boss. Collects SOUTHERN BASTARDS #5-8.
When my daughter whines – and trust me, she can whine – I always have the same rejoinder: “Life is hard.” Not “life is bad,” or “life will crush you” – “life is hard.” It is hard to figure out how to live in the world, how to be the person you want to be, how to not scream at people all day long. Even when things are going relatively your way, life presents lots of difficulties, and no one is immune from it.
That said, for Euless Boss, life isn’t hard – it is near impossible.
Boss, a man being raised by his absolute shithead of a father, is trying to do anything he can for life to be something other sadness. When we meet the young Boss, he’s a scrawny kid, barely able to stand, let alone make a football team. But he won’t give up – he is trying his best to make the team, because football is his only ticket out of the life that he’s currently saddled with. His mom’s dead, his father is an abusive thief, and he lives in a broken down trailer on the edge of town. His family name is synonymous with dereliction, and he has no prospects at all to make himself better. None except football, and that’s not exactly going well for him.
This sounds more like a Hallmark card or a Lifetime movie than a gritty comic at this point, but Aaron and Latour never let you feel too sorry for Euless. By keeping bits of the story happening in the current day, we get flashes of who this boy becomes, and because of that, it keeps the book from being saccharine or morose. It is also helped by Latour’s artwork, which is uncompromising and gritty throughout the book. Football is a violent game, but never the focal point of the violence in “Southern Bastards.” Football is treated like war – the participants are soldiers, and they know what they’re getting themselves into. Sure, bones break, and injuries happen, but that’s just the price you pay for a shot at glory.
Boss eventually encounters a man called ‘Big,’ a blind, African American ball boy for the school. While Big is the reason that Euless starts thinking about football in new ways and, in some ways, creates the Coach Boss that we see in the ‘modern’ tales, he’s a problematic character. He borders dangerously close to the ‘magical negro‘ trope, as Spike Lee coined the phrase, from films like The Legend of Bagger Vance or The Green Mile. [Editor’s note: I don’t love the use of the term ‘negro,’ but I feel that it is appropriate here, as it uses the term in an anachronistic way] Big has no mystical powers, but he’s somehow a blind man who can listen to a football game on television and know what’s going on, or can hear formations during practice.
Big is an important character because he is what opens up Euless’s mind to football as something more than just a physical endeavor, and someone who believes in him – probably for the first time in his life. The problem is that the characterization is so close to being a stereotype that the gravitational pull of the trope pulls Big into that orbit. Even at the end of the story, when Big realizes the role he’s played in Boss’s rise to power, he never transcends the trope – even his exit from the story feels ripped out of legend.
Continued belowAs the series progresses, Jason Latour’s art continues to enhance the story in brutal and subtle ways. While I was re-reading this arc, I realized just how much of the story would still be there if this was a silent comic. Sure, the characters wouldn’t be as a rich, or the motivations quite so clear, but Latour pours so much emotional honesty into his work, that everyone’s story is written on their faces.
It would be very easy for this book to be quite dour, but Latour’s art also has lots of humor thrown in – specifically in the names of establishments and little visual nods here and there – and that levity makes the story breathe so much better. Breath is an interesting way to look at the book, actually: every time a character seems to get a second to fill their lungs, the air is knocked right out of them. Mr. Boss breathes a sigh of relief that his son needs him, and then he find out how. Big helps Euless become a football player, but then is shocked when he becomes a monster. Coach Boss has put Tubb behind him, and then Big exits the scene.
And that’s part of the book being a football tale – football is made up of short plays that are physically brutal and full of psychology and cooperation. I’m not particularly a football fan, but I can appreciate the planning and physicality of the sport. The main reason I’m not a fan is because of the culture of football, which starts when kids are in grade school, is a brutal one, that places real human safety in front of fans for us to gawk at. It dehumanizes people into puppets, and…come to think of it, it is the perfect setting for this story.
Final Verdict: 7.0 – Coach Boss is still a repulsive character, but ‘Gridiron’ helps you to understand him in a way that seemed impossible just a few issues prior. If it wasn’t for Big and his border-line stereotypical characterization, the second volume would be just as great as the first.
