Donna Barr's Stinz

My farm stuff isn’t like your usual fantasy rural area; the farmers get dirty, swear, and many of them drink moonshine when they can get it.  Some of ‘em mistreat their farm-hands and bully their families.

Your fantasy rural area is how adults act when the kids are around, and then only on Sundays.

A reader once suggested, since Stinz’s world looked vaguely like ours, that I should do a picture of him rearing up on his hind legs painting the swastika off a Stuka.  I replied that farmers originally welcomed the Nazis because they, at least at first, subsidized the farmers, to keep the rural base until they could really get stuck in.  People always forget the extended time-line on this stuff.

And, of course, they helped the farmers run out their Jewish neighbors so they could auction their farms. Later on, when the government took control of all land, the farmers got pissed off, not recognizing the precedent — or the irony.

You Americans will recognize this pattern.