Pack Rat Magazine is the dandy highwayman you’re too scared to mention
A big fat congratulations are in order for Marek Bennett, comic strip author/artist, and friend to Pack Rat Magazine. Those of you who have been visiting our site from the beginning will remember the interview we did with Marek about his Comics Workshop for kids. And now Marek’s work has received the recognition it deserves. He recently won the Xeric Grant for comic book self publishing. Read the press release below for more info. Well done, Mr. Bennett, kudos to you from your friends at Pack Rat.
“Mimi’s Doughnuts” Wins Xeric Award
Prestigious Self-Publishing Grant Goes to New Hampshire Comic Strip
Henniker, New Hampshire — The weekly comic strip “Mimi’s Doughnuts” has won a coveted Xeric Grant for comic book self publishing. With this award, creator Marek Bennett will self-publish a trade paperback anthology of the past four years of his comics.
The Xeric-funded anthology, entitled Breakfast at Mimi’s Doughnuts, will collect the best of the strip’s first two hundred episodes, plus several pages of original artwork and special features. Bennett plans to release the collection in the spring of 2009.
“Mimi’s Doughnuts” follows the lives of an extended family that runs a small neighborhood doughnut shop in fictional Claymont, New Hampshire. Bennett bases the strip loosely on his wife’s childhood growing up at family doughnut shops and diners in Claremont, New Hampshire.
“The characters and stories are mixtures of people and places we’ve known, people and issues I encounter in my teaching, and new ideas that come up every day,” says Bennett. “It’s the perfect setting to address so many of the issues facing small towns all over our country today.”
Past storylines use humor to deal with serious topics like diet, politics, littering, real estate development, lung cancer, domestic abuse, and global warming. Often, real-life stories and adventures find their way into Bennett’s comics. In 2007, while Bennett’s family rescued over thirty stray kittens from an abandoned house in Henniker, his comic strip characters found themselves also rescuing feral cats.
Bennett has drawn “Mimi’s Doughnuts” since 2003. The strip currently appears weekly in New Hampshire and Vermont newspapers. Bennett also offers quarterly mail-order ‘zines of his comics, with subscriptions available at his website. Bennett’s popular Comics Workshop programs for elementary- and teenaged artists run all Summer long at several locations in New Hampshire. For more information, visit Bennett’s website at: www.marekbennett.com.
The Xeric Foundation of Northampton, Massachussetts, supports independent self-publishers in the comics industry through competitive grant programs. The Foundation was established by Peter Laird, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For more information, visit: http://xericfoundation.org.
























