After being sworn in as Vermont’s fifth cartoonist laureate in June 2023, Tillie Walden was approached by Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, executive director of Vermont Humanities. The Vermont cartoonist laureate is tasked with creating comics depicting noteworthy events in the state, and Ilstrup pitched Walden on telling the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a gay couple who openly shared their lives together in the small town of Weybridge in the 19th century. Upon examining the historical materials about the pair Ilstrup provided, Walden was smitten. “I was immediately gripped by their story,” she says. “I’ve always loved historical books, but I’d never had the chance to actually make one before. That it all happened in Vermont in the 1800s just seemed like it was meant to be, that the universe brought it to my doorstep.”
The 29-year-old spoke with PW from her home in Vermont, which she shares with her wife, cartoonist and writer Emma Hunsinger, and their young son, Walter. Including Charity & Sylvia, out from Drawn & Quarterly in June, Walden has produced a dozen solo graphic novels, and has illustrated several others, including a picture book by Hunsinger and a pair of middle grade titles written by Canadian indie pop duo Tegan and Sara. Walden has won many accolades and awards, including Eisners for Spinning in 2018—at the tender age of 22, making her one of the award’s youngest winners ever—and Are You Listening? in 2022.
In May 2024, Walden took up residency at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History to conduct extensive research for Charity & Sylvia. “It involved a lot of sitting and learning to read very old handwriting,” she recalls. “Among all the materials, there are two journals of Sylvia’s that are quite lengthy, but she writes very small. It took me a year, but I read them all.”
In addition to getting minutiae correct, Walden wanted to convey the lifeblood of her subjects. “I basically looked for kernels of personality,” she says, “though even the mundane aspects of their lives were interesting to me. They wrote down what they ate, what they said at church, who their neighbors were. I think I spent more time researching than I did actually drawing! I had to draw the book pretty fast.”
With the cover for our spring comics and graphic novels preview issue, Walden wanted to capture what it felt like to create Charity & Sylvia. “It was really like spring had come again within me,” she says. “One of my goals with this comic was to remind myself why this medium matters to me, and use simple tools to tell a complex story. It’s cheesy, but it did feel like a bloom all around every time my pen touched the paper.”
What Walden ultimately captures in the graphic novel is a complex portrait of two highly respected women in their community who were deeply devoted to one another while battling demons of self-doubt and reconciling their romantic feelings with their religious faith. When asked what she’d most like for readers to take away from the book, Walden is clear: “I would love for people to be able to inhabit life in 1825, to understand and empathize with what it was like to live in early America, in a rural community. And to see what it was like to be gay back then, and how these women justified themselves. In telling their story, I’m also trying to reach my arms out across lines, past my usual younger readers, to Christian America. I want to show them that the history of faith and the history of queerness are not disconnected.”
Read more from our spring 2026 comics & graphic novels preview feature.
