I spent my formative teen years (13–18) in North Carolina after moving from New York. Arriving as an outsider produced an immediate culture shock: candid speech or simple self-advocacy drew ire in ways I’d never known. I was taught to feel like I didn’t belong. Beneath the courteous manners and outward hospitality I encountered an entrenched prejudice unlike anything I’d experienced elsewhere — and when I left for the North after high school, I didn’t look back.
No work captures that uneasy dynamic for me like Jason Aaron and Jason Latour’s Southern Bastards. Though set in the fictional Craw County — loosely inspired by an unincorporated area in Russell County, Alabama — the setting reads as a living, corrosive character. Like the town in HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, Craw County is a small place with a dark core: cruelty is normalized, silence sustains power, and the idea of moral courage is continually eroded. Southern Bastards is a visceral, self-contained narrative that still resonates, and it’s now being adapted for live action at Hulu with Bill Dubuque and Nia DaCosta attached as writers and executive producers. Deadline.
The series remains, frustratingly, one of the most compelling unfinished comics of recent years — its run ended at issue #20 after allegations involving co-creator Jason Latour paused production. Even so, the work is essential reading: its sharp, unflinching examination of small‑town power and the social mechanics that enable it feels especially relevant now.
At the story’s center is Earl Tubb, an aging Vietnam veteran who returns to his Alabama hometown after his father’s death and finds the county dominated by Boss, a corrupt high‑school football coach. What opens as a man confronting old wounds becomes a brutal study of cyclical violence, inherited power, and the poisonous pride that can pass from one generation to the next.
Earl’s arc sets the emotional tenor: he ran from his past for decades — using the war as an escape from his father and the town — only to discover, forty years later, that the place he left has metastasized. His father, once a sheriff whose methods were mythologized, is now a memory overshadowed by Boss’s outright rule. A near‑fatal beating of an old friend forces Earl to stop running and confront the system that’s hollowed out Craw County.
One of the series’ most potent revelations arrives at the close of issue #4 — a turning point that reframes the story and should remain a secret as the show’s publicity unfolds. The twist lands with the shock of a major TV blowup and explains, in part, why a filmmaker like Nia DaCosta is a natural fit as a creative steward; her work on Candyman demonstrated a deftness for stories rooted in community histories and the legacies of place. Time explored DaCosta’s approach to community in Candyman (2021).
“I love the South, but the South also scares the living shit out of me.” — Jason Aaron (letters column)
That line — candid and ambivalent — captures Southern Bastards’ outlook: the South is rendered in full, with both its beauty and its brutality on display. Aaron and his collaborators reveal how tradition, loyalty, and spectacle conceal systemic rot: local elites manipulate affection and obligation to maintain authority, and the rituals that seem wholesome on the surface — football, barbecues, small‑town solidarity — can cover a far more damaged reality.
Many of the behaviors and attitudes Elias describes have been abandoned elsewhere but persist here; the comic’s small‑town story reads like a mirror for broader national currents. A decade after the series debuted, its portrait of entrenched attitudes still feels timely — perhaps because the country has only gradually reckoned with some of the problems it depicts.
Source: Polygon
