In the previous volume of Southern Bastards, readers were introduced to Euless Boss, a vile football coach with a stranglehold on a rural southern wasteland known as Craw County. In the latest edition of this deep fried crime anthology, we witness the origin of the southern villain and how he came to be the most fearsome bastard of his whole town.
Back in his youth, Euless Boss was a small boy with a dream of being a linebacker for his school’s football team, the Running Rebs. He was a hopeful youth with dreams of dominating the gridiron and gaining the affections of his unloving father. However, Boss did not grow up with the support of his teammates, coach, or father. He fought every step of the way, receiving verbal and physical abuse every day he walked onto the field for practice. Faced with the insurmountable goal of making the football team, Boss turned to the help of an old blind sports janitor to help him make the team by any means necessary — unwittingly setting into motion a dark accession to power in his hometown.
The artwork of Jason Latour continues to be a fine fit for the series. He consistently crafts artwork that brings the town and people of Craw County to life with grit-filled authenticity and grime. The character design of Euless Boss is by itself a work of fine craftsmanship, with every detail line helping to further accentuate the mannerisms and characteristics of the twisted football coach.
Jason Aaron succeeds in writing a story that is as painful as it is captivating. Boss’s climb to power is written with compelling realism. Every page feels like a bitter walk down memory lane rife with terror, pitch black hatred, and palpable anguish — made all the more enjoyable with his top-notch dialogue and excellent story pacing.
While he is a monster of a man, Euless Boss is a character with the obsessive desire to be the best when it comes to football, and for that reason alone, he is an identifiable lead in Southern Bastards. While his actions are unjustifiably evil, it is hard not to empathize with the character given his abusive and cruel upbringing. As Boss suffers through the hard road to making his dreams true, readers cannot help but share in his pain and anger, feeling all the more content when the character enacts painful retribution on his opponents via debilitating tackles and checks.
Admittedly, it is hard to decide what is more frightening when reading Southern Bastards: the unsettlingly origin of Coach Boss or the fact that underneath his cold and frightening exterior is man with whom audiences can identify. Southern Bastards is not your run of the mill, feel-good football story. In every way imaginable it’s the very opposite, yet all the more engaging and addictive to read. Southern Bastards is a more than entertaining work that will leave its readers conflicted as they cheer begrudgingly for the vilest son of a bitch to hit a comic’s page.
