Drawing Conclusions in the 2022 Cartoon Issue 

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• Jim DuVal | Rev. Diane Sullivan

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Seven Days Cartoon Issue. Those early issues were especially ambitious. Originally conceived by cofounder Pamela Polston, the Cartoon Issue was meant to encompass nearly the entire paper: news, features, arts, food and music. Basically, anything that wasn't syndicated or a column (or already a cartoon) was cartoonified. It was pretty awesome — but also very difficult. Producing cartoons at the same high level as our written stories proved daunting.

So we've scaled back the Cartoon Issue in recent years, favoring quality over quantity. We hope the results in these pages speak for themselves.

Our resident comics expert, music editor Chris Farnsworth, teamed up with cartoonist Ezra Veitch to recount the heyday of the Rutland Halloween parade, when some of the biggest writers and artists from Marvel and DC Comics would descend upon the city. That cartoon was partly the inspiration for this week's cover, drawn by artist Jim DuVal.

Food writer Melissa Pasanen and artist Ivy Allie proved a great match for creating a comic about what a dating app for restaurants on the market might look like.

Here's hoping Robbie's Wildlife Refuge is never up for sale. Freelancer Ryan Miller and artist Michael Tonn braved the Jeffersonville bar for the latest installment of Miller's "Deep Dives" series. The bar was, well, wild.

Staff writer Ken Picard and artist Annabel Driussi explored a trio of people with medical curiosities who lived in Cavendish in the 1800s. You've probably heard of one of them, Phineas Gage.

Speaking of Driussi, she features in another Cartoon Issue story, though it's not a cartoon. She's one of the new leaders of the recently relaunched Ladybroad Ledger, a comics newspaper for femme- and nonbinary-identifying cartoonists.

Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann has been drawing comics for longer than most of our other contributors have been alive. Sally Pollak interviewed him about how his comics inform his other artistic works (page 38).

Finally, several readers wrote in asking us to find out why Dustin Henderson is wearing a T-shirt from the 1986 Craftsbury Banjo Contest in the latest season of "Stranger Things." We couldn't solve the mystery, but cartoonist Cuyler Keating and I did learn a lot about the rowdy music festival — bikers and Deadheads and banjos, oh my!