Zeb Larson reviews Southern Bastards #14…
The big game is over. But the troubles have only just begun. The return of Roberta Tubb.
Southern Bastards is finally back, and it’s bringing us Roberta Tubb. I feel like I’ve been waiting for this since the end of the first arc, as Aaron and Latour have been dancing around the margins with this character. They put the issue on solid thematic ground by taking us back in some ways to the first issues of this series. Coach Boss is about to have another enemy coming for him, one who seems to even tougher than her old man. This review will contain some small spoilers, so consider yourself forewarned.
Thematically, this issue picks up where the first arc began: it’s about a complicated relationship with a father. Roberta doesn’t seem to have the level of anger and resentment toward Earl that Earl had for his father, and the one flashback showing both of them is actually amicable. All the resentment for Earl seems to be coming from Roberta’s mother, though that is left unexplained. Still, Roberta also had trouble getting close to her father. In her words, she never really knew him, apart from things he disliked: long hair on men (bad news for me), unkempt yards, and bullshit. In essence, she knew he was a pain in the ass.
At that level though, she’s a chip off the old block. None of the Tubbs know how to walk away from an injustice, whether it’s some dog taking a dump on their porch, a couple of drug dealers beating somebody to death, or an unresolved murder. Earl and Roberta are uncannily alike, barely able to manage themselves around other people. They both want to try take the easy out and try to walk away from what’s bothering them, but they just can’t bring themselves to. For Roberta, this will mean figuring out exactly how her father died. And, if there were any doubts about her, this issue shows that she’s more than capable of delivering an ass-wupping.
Roberta’s race and gender are both simultaneously issues in this book. She’s facing two bars of discrimination all at once; it only takes a few minutes of being in Earl’s old house before the cops are being called about a “suspicious” character. When she keeps her cool and talks her way out of it, she still gets to hear them express disbelief that she could be a war hero, and then blame Obama for it (for her gender, or the color of her skin, or both?). Perhaps that where that toughness comes from: she’s a Tubb, but she has to endure twice as much humiliation just for existing. All the casually racist bullshit she has to endure is simply too much, and it’s going to push her into a confrontation with Boss.
I wish that we had been able to spend a little more time inside Roberta’s head and visit her past. She alludes to her time in Afghanistan (Alabama was apparently the perfect warmup for Kabul), but I would have liked to see a few more bits of it. Then again, she’s about to go and apply that skillset to Coach Boss. Should make for good reading.
Rating: 9.3/10
Zeb Larson
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Originally published May 11, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
