Southern Bastards, an Image Comics series created by Jason Aaron and Jason Latour, has been picked up as pilot for Hulu. And I didn’t write about it when the news broke yesterday because frankly, I’ve been wrestling with how to report something like this given the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault levied against Latour back in 2020.
To get the first part out of the way, the book focuses on Craw County, Alabama, “home of Boss BBQ, the state champion Runnin’ Rebs football team, and more bastards than you’ve ever seen; Bastards like Earl Tubb, an angry old man with a very big stick, and Euless Boss, a high school football coach with no more room in his office for trophies and no more room underneath the bleachers for burying bodies.” The series while it was running was compared to Sopranos meets Friday Night Lights, and it was a huge hit, both critically and financially.
The potential TV show will come from writers and executive producers Bill Dubuque and Nia DaCosta, with Matt Olmstead serving as showrunner and executive producer. It will come from Onyx Collective, POV Entertainment, and Proximity Media, in association with Fifth Season.
It will also, per Deadline, be executive produced by Aaron and Latour. Which, great for Aaron, he’s one of the hardest working men in comics with multiple series running at a time.
The issue comes with Latour who, as previously mentioned, was accused of harassment by multiple women back in 2020, as well as assault by at least one. After the allegations came out, Marvel — Latour co-created Spider-Gwen for the publisher — seemingly cut ties with the creator (or at least had no future plans with him). And Southern Bastards, which was already on an extended hiatus starting in 2018, has yet to return for additional issues. Latour did respond to one of the allegations, but more surfaced after. He has not had any mainstream comics work since, but a Kickstarter he launched back in August of this year was successfully funded at over $40,000 on a $10,000 goal.
Should Latour be credited? Should he be making money off of this? Should Southern Bastards be moving forward at all, with one large part of the creative team behind it has these allegations in his past? Certainly, Aaron — who has been working on getting this on TV for years now, including a deal in 2019 with FX and Scott Rudin (who was let go from his job after accusations of abusive behavior) — likely thinks so. Given the Executive Producer credit, though, it’s tough to say monetarily how much Latour will benefit from this pilot — if at all. It could be a ceremonial credit at best. We’ve reached out to Hulu for comment, but did not hear word back as of publication time.
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