Zeb Larson reviews Southern Bastards #7…
As a kid, Euless Boss had football in his blood. But all football ever did for him was make him bleed. Until the day he met a strange man who would change his life and the fate of Craw County forever.
Southern Bastards has done the impossible: I’m actually starting to feel genuine sympathy for Euless Boss, even if I still think he’s a total bastard. Indeed, he’s emerging as a truly powerful anti-hero, a man who does awful things after the world shit all over him for the first twenty years of his life. At that level, we can almost understand why the man acts the way that he does. I will be discussing some spoilers in this review, so read on at your own discretion.
Despite taking a bullet in the foot, Euless refuses to give up on playing football, and his style of playing becomes ever more brutal on the field. He and Big manage to drive away his father, and Euless manages to enjoy a brief period in the sun as a brutally effective linebacker. But like all things, high school football must end, and when it does, Euless doesn’t have anything else to move on to. With no college prospects to speak of, and still on near the lowest rung in Craw County, he’s forced to take the only job he can get, and it’s as humiliating as it can possibly be.
On a trivial note, finally that legend of Alabama football, “Bear” Bryant has shown up. I’m almost surprised it took us seven issues to get a mention of that hero of southern football. In fact, present-day Euless has a bit of Bear’s face, if Bear had been substantially meaner and more gnarled looking. Bear actually ended up suing a reporter for alleging that he encouraged his players to engage in on-the-field brutality, which we can certainly imagine Boss going for. Bear pushed for racially integrated teams, and Boss hasn’t shown himself to be a racist (at least as of yet). I don’t know if Jason Aaron is looking to make Euless pretend to be Bear or if I’m just reading too closely into this, but if nothing else, it helps you remember where this series is set.
We’re being set up for a pretty epic revenge tale at this point, as every issue has focused on the humiliation Euless has endured as a kid. At this point, I’m rooting for him to take down a number of different people, and I’m actually hoping he gets them in as grizzly a way as possible. We know it will happen, and the only question is how brutally Euless will end up taking power in Craw County.
So, if the underlying question of volume two is how you make Euless Boss into such a bastard, then it seems clear that it has to come from constant abuse by a bunch of other bastards. What is it that makes Craw County so bad, and why can’t it seem to get better? This poses all sorts of interesting questions for any place that just always seems to be corrupt, and violent, and dark. What makes it so bad in the first place? And what, if anything can anybody do anything about it?
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E&v=qqtW2LRPtQY&feature=player_embedded
Originally published February 11, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
