Zeb Larson reviews Southern Bastards #4…
THE EXPLOSIVE ENDING TO OUR FIRST ARC! Earl Tubb and his big stick finally come face to face with Coach Boss. This will not be pretty.
Southern Bastards comes to the end of its first story arc, and it is a messy, bloody ending, one with unsettling implications. If you were hoping for a Hollywood ending, keep on looking. But damn, this was a great ride to get here. There are going to be some big spoilers for this up ahead, so if you want to enjoy the shock of the ending, quit reading here and scroll down a bit farther.
Spoilers…
Earl Tubb flashes back briefly on his time in Vietnam, when a commanding officer ribbed him for being from Alabama. In the present, he sits on the ruined porch of his family home and makes one last call to the person he’s been leaving messages with. He goes out with his stick to try and make a difference one more time. Tubb meets Esaw in front of the rib place, and Tubb tries to rally some of the locals who’ve come to gawk to push back against Coach Boss. The crowd wants none of this, however, and some stranger starts throwing rocks at him before Esaw and a couple of thugs set in on him.
Tubb manages to beat Esaw and a few of the other knuckle-draggers before staggering into the restaurant, where Coach Boss is eating. They trade insults, Boss insulting Tubb’s father and Tubb making fun of Boss’s lousy football playing when he was a high schooler. This pushes Boss over the edge, and in a brutal fist fight, he beats and presumably kills Tubb with the club in front of a crowd of people and the town sheriff. In the epilogue, in an army base overseas (presumably Afghanistan), we see Earl Tubb’s daughter returning his calls after being out on patrol.
I’m wondering where exactly we go from here, now that Tubb is almost assuredly out of the action. Tubb’s daughter isn’t going to roll in either, given that she’s fighting a war in Afghanistan, and I’m wondering whether Southern Bastards is going to work as a sort of anthology series. Or perhaps Earl Tubb’s story was never the point of this story arc. Jason Aaron wanted to tell a story about the South, or at least a fictionalized part of it. Here Was a Man was just the introduction to Craw County, which I think is the story that Jason Aaron really wants to tell.
End Spoilers
Jason Aaron was letting it be known early on that this wasn’t going to end well, and I feel like a lot of this series has been a critical send-up of the original Walking Tall. All the signs were there, especially in the lackluster response everybody had to Tubb’s warnings. Tubb thinks that he can inspire people to reject Coach Boss’s wrongdoing and that there must be decent people in Craw County. As it turns out, he’s wrong, and the people of Craw County are very willing to ignore ugliness and violence as long as a pleasant façade is maintained. The fact that Earl Tubb is trying to pull down that façade doesn’t make him a hero to them. I like that Jason Aaron subverted the hero trope by showing just hard it is to change a fundamentally broken system, especially when that system puts on good football games and cooks tasty food.
I was a little disappointed that the dialogue leading up to the final confrontation didn’t last a bit longer, if only because I was enjoying what little dialogue we had so much. Most of this issue really was confrontation and violence. Given the set-up the first three issues gave us, it’s not a shock that this ended so explosively. Now I’m hoping we’ll get some more backstory on the county, its history, and maybe some insight into how a place can look so nice and be so goddamned bad.
Zeb Larson
Originally published September 3, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
