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Little Bentonville is a fictional town neighboring Bentonville, Arkansas. If you’re not familiar with Bentonville, it’s the home office to one of America’s largest real estate owners, Walmart.
The joke with Bentonville, at least what I picked up from a few places, is that they call it “Vendorville”. Anyone who wants to have something sold at Walmart sets up shop there.
So I thought, “What would it be like to live next door and see none of the benefits? What if everyone in the town who can leave, does, leaving only people who are stuck (for whatever reason) to remain? What do they do?”
In Little Bentonville, they decide to build a giant box store the size of the town, incorporating everything from the church to the community swimming pool.
Little Bentonville was meant to be a comic done in a documentary style talking about life at the store / town. It never got off the ground (too expensive to produce and not enough time to write it), so the idea sat for a few years.
When I was looking to replace the gypsies in Dracula, I thought it might be a good idea to replace them with the people of Little Bentonville, letting the Walmart jokes flow from there.
Although not in the book version of Dracula And Kittens, if you keep an eye on the web version you’ll see Little Bentonville and its people playing a role.
Little Bentonville Issue #1
Below is the first strip, unlettered, from Little Bentonville. It’s 3am, and our hero is working his first shift. Everything is dead until the store mascot, Sasha, appears on screen announcing a sale occurring only from 3am to 4am.
Here are a few versions of the strip from different artists:
