• Alison Bechdel | Diane Sullivan

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this week's edition of Seven Days is pretty much priceless. Now in its sixth year, our annual Cartoon Issue is a staff favorite — and not just because it gives our feature writers a week to slack off. In fact, in some ways, the exact opposite is true. For those of us accustomed to telling tales with lots of words, it's a serious challenge to distill stories to their barest essentials to fit into a handful of cartoon panels. But as they say, brevity is the soul of wit.

That doesn't mean cartoons are always comic. While the following features are meant to be entertaining, the focus is on telling a good story.

For generations, the denizens of tiny Chester have been telling a great one about a onetime resident known as the Gentleman Burglar. But, as we discovered, a fine line is sometimes drawn between fact and fiction.

Those lines might blur when taking up the practice of microdosing mushrooms. Then again, as Ken Picard reports, some users find clarity in psilocybin. (And no, it's not legal. Yet.)

In, um, researching her story, Rachel Elizabeth Jones found seeking balance through "goat yoga" to be a bit of a stretch. The goats sure are cute, though.

While creating a graphic biography of 19th-century novelist Charlotte Brontë (best known for Jane Eyre), Burlington cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes has made a rather famous imaginary friend. So we asked her to both tell and draw that story.

On our cover, current Vermont cartoonist laureate Alison Bechdel suggests there are far more than just dykes to watch out for these days.