Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

The Alabama-set crime comic %27Southern Bastards%27 debuts in April

Central character is an old man who%27s come home to find his county in bad shape

Series is described as %27Dukes of Hazzard%27 by way of the Coen brothers

Not only do the Alabama denizens of the upcoming comic book Southern Bastards live up to their name, the tension is as thick as the local barbecue sauce.

Writer Jason Aaron and artist Jason Latour cook up a Southern-fried crime story with their Image Comics series debuting April 30, and Aaron describes it as his "love letter/hate rant to the South" mixed with the 1970s "redneck cinema" that gave pop culture Walking Tall.

"It's more a dark version of The Dukes of Hazzard if it was done by the Coen brothers," says Aaron, adding that it puts a "weirder edge" on the type of grittiness and character study of his Western-tinged noir series Scalped.

Southern Bastards follows the journey homeward of Earl Tubb, an old man returning to small-town Craw County, Ala., many years after leaving. One of his relatives died, so he's come back for a few days to tidy things up.

Earl's father, Bertrand, was the sheriff who cleaned up the town and rid the place of the riff-raff and ne'er-do-wells years ago back in the old Dixie Mafia days of the 1970s. This huge legendary figure is long gone, though, and Earl finds the whole county's gone to hell again.

Needless to say, he sticks around for more than a few days.

"He starts to get pulled into what's going on and starts to see what's become of this place he grew up, the place he ran from, the legacy of his father he ran from," Aaron says, "so through his eyes we start to meet this whole cast of characters in town who really are the Southern bastards of the title."

A strong criminal element runs the county, and the "godfather" is Euless Boss, the coach of the five-time state champion Runnin' Rebs. And he has a loyal following that isn't afraid to put up their dukes when someone starts walking tall with a really big stick in heroic fashion.

The initial arc is a graphic novel/pilot episode for the series, Aaron says. "You won't really know what the book is about until you get to the end of that first story."

The action takes place in a barbecue restaurant in the first issue, the second issue takes place at a high school football game, and when it comes to those Southern qualities, "we lean hard into that," Aaron says.

He grew up in Alabama and Latour was born and raised in North Carolina, "so we're both writing about the people and places we know," the writer says. "I don't think I really could have done this book with anybody else. It's important that Southern Bastards is done by two Southern bastards."

Adds Latour: "It's a cliché perhaps but the South is either in your veins or it's not. There are people who move away and never lose it, people who've never been here but find themselves in touch with it overnight."

From character designs to little details, Latour admits that he's pulling a lot from his own experiences. A former linebacker, he's one of the few comics artists he knows of who played football in high school — "Not that I was any good, but I have a lot of experience with that culture" — and his mother is from rural North Carolina, "so a lot of the faces of my youth are seeming to turn up in these drawings, independent of my control even."

The South has always been seeded into his work, Latour adds, "but this feels like the first chance I've had to let loose and let it all pour out. It's hard to pin down what that is, but it feels right so far."

As much as it is a part of both of them, Aaron and Latour both feel that there are some negatives of the South that they're also tackling along the way in Southern Bastards.

Aaron moved away from Alabama 14 years ago, he says, "so I know enough about it but am removed from it now to be objective. I'm able to write about the things I love and the things I hate about the South."

When Latour first met him, he knew he had that internal conflict in common with Aaron, "that crazy behind the eyes that you only see in people who wrestle with the good and bad of where we're both from," the artist says.

"That conflict is drama, and I think we're both looking forward to watching that drama holler and stomp and kick ass in wearing the boots of a genre we both love, which is crime fiction. That vehicle is the only true chance we've got to parse out these feelings and make any sense of them. Hopefully, it's a hell of a ride in the process."

Aaon feels that in many ways Southern Bastards is his most personal series to date.

"On the one hand, we want it to be a very smart look at the South but also a book about big dumb rednecks," he says. "We're trying to do both of those at the same time so it's dark and it's funny and it's real and even a little bit of the supernatural involved at times. We're trying to cover all the bases."