I’ve been drawing wedding invitation cartoons for my friends for years, caricaturing them in Candorville style, and the invites have always been a big hit. So I figured, why not offer this to anyone who wants it, whether friend, stranger, or bitter arch-enemy? If you want your own wedding invitation Candorvillized, visit the new Candorville Custom Wedding Cartoons page!

Here’s the pitch:

That wedding invitation with the elegant couple and the heart and the dove on it sure is nice. But will anyone be talking about it? Will anyone (other than your mother) hold onto it for years, or maybe even frame it?Get custom artwork for your wedding invitations, t-shirts, or simply to frame. Just e-mail us some photos of the happy couple, and we’ll turn them into caricatures standing atop a wedding cake. Getting married in Vegas? We’ll add in some Elvis backup singers. Getting married at the zoo? We’ll even throw in some animals (the animals in this example are the ones not on top of the cake).

We’ll e-mail you print-ready artwork you can give your favorite printer (we recommend Vistaprint.com). Or, if you’re in a hurry, we can handle the printing for you and have your finished invitations shipped directly to you (see details on the wedding cartoons page).

ATTENTION SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA READERS! AS I mentioned, the San Francisco Chronicle is substituting Candorville for Doonesbury while Garry Trudeau takes a vacation. They’re seriously considering keeping Candorville even after Doonesbury returns, but they need to hear from their readers. So far they’ve had a couple hundred responses, and readers favor Candorville by about 60% to 40%. But they want to hear from more of you, so if you want to see Candorville in the Chronicle permanently, you’ve got to write to them right now and tell them so.From the Chronicle:

For more than a century now, ever since a couple of newspaper barons tussled over a strip called the Yellow Kid in the1890s, the folks who put daily newspapers together have known that comic strips are no laughing matter. You can muckabout with a lot of things, but you’re asking for trouble with readers the minute you start mucking about with the comics.                                                               

The reason is that people take comic strips personally. That isn’t to say they don’t care about what’s on the front page,or what candidate for public office a paper endorses. But many readers develop a stronger relationship with the comics,and the stuff we call “furniture” - puzzles, Dear Abby, Miss Manners, the chess column, etc. - for the simple reason thatmany of these features appear every day and folks look forward to them as part of their morning ritual.A few weeks ago, when Garry Trudeau, the genius behind the long-running comic strip Doonesbury, decided to take a three-month break, we decided to give another strip, Candorville, a trial run until Doonesbury returns in June. While we liked Candorville, it was more important to hear from readers…We received more than 200 responses, including a few phone messages.

On Candorville, it isn’t surprising that opinions ran the gamut. The reason is simple: Virtually every comics page in the United States is a buffet table of offerings. Some strips are old-fashioned, simply drawn, others are edgier, perhaps even political, and still others are ironically dry. It isn’t surprising, for example, that one reader who wrote to suggest the return of Beetle Bailey also mentioned that she liked Blondie, Dennis the Menace and Peanuts. Other readers who tended toward the edgier strips, like Doonesburyand Candorville, also seemed to like Bliss, Brevity and the Fusco Brothers. As for Candorville, some readers knew the strip from other Bay Area papers and were hopeful that it would find apermanent home in The Chronicle. Others knew the strip and hoped it would never find a permanent home in The Chronicle.While some newcomers to the strip either liked or disliked it immediately, others weren’t opposed to it but wanted to see how it developed in the weeks ahead.                                  

In general, counting those who wanted to give the strip a chance, the votes were about 60 percent for and 40 percentagainst. Of course, as we’ve learned from the endless presidential primary season, polls are not always accurate. In this case, if we received 200 letters and e-mails, you have to assume that these are people who care deeply enough about aparticular comic strip or the page in general to write in, as opposed to just answering a poll question with a yes or no. The sample, as they say in the poll-taking business, is not large enough to be significant… 

Allow this bonehead to reassure everyone: We are told by Trudeau’s syndicate that he plans to return with new strips in June and we’re as anxious as you are to get them back into the paper. What you may be seeing in other papers are reruns, just as we rerun Peanuts as Classic Peanuts. In the meantime, there’s Candorville, drawn by Darrin Bell. A few readers said or implied that one of the reasons they like it is because its lead characters are African American. That was one of the reasons we were first attracted to it,to be sure. We want to find strips that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area, but that’s easier said than done. For one thing, there are a lot of strips of every kind out there and you’d be surprised how few of them are very good, or funny,or even well-drawn. Several times a year, we’re visited by very nice people representing the comics syndicates and theyall tell us how certain they are that some new strip will do well in our market. And several times a year, I look at them and wonder if they have any idea of what our market is. Or, in a few cases, what planet that market is on. We’re going to continue to scout the horizon for new strips and, in fact, we’ve got a few in the bullpen already. Diversity will count heavily in our selection. So will quality. But if we find something new, it’s probable that the onlyway to bring it to you every morning is by eliminating something else. That’s where the tough choices come in, but we won’t make them without your participation.                           

Do you like [Candorville]? Let us know. E-mail us at candorcomment@sfchronicle.com, or send me a letter at The San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco CA 94103. 

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat pulled Candorville a couple months ago to try out some other strips. Thanks to readers who wrote in and asked them to return Candorville to the comics page, it’s back as of yesterday. Papers rarely hear from readers when they do something the readers agree with, so you might want to write to them and thank them for returning it to the page.

When you have 45 minutes to kill, watch this:

If you noticed “Candorville” in Doonesbury’s usual space in the San Francisco Chronicle today, it’s not a premature April Fool’s joke. Doonesbury’s creator is taking a three-month vacation, and the Chronicle (and several other papers) are substituting Candorville.From today’s Chronicle: 

We want to offer you a chance to get to know the folks in Candorville, a very popular strip created by Darrin Bell. Until Doonesbury returns, we will add the strip to the daily paper Monday and to the Sunday paper on April 6. On Sunday and March 30, we will publish Doonesbury reruns. We know you have strong opinions about which strips you like and which you don’t. We want to hear from you about Candorville or, for that matter, any of our other comics.Take a minute and tell us what you think. E-mail us at candorcomment@sfchronicle.com, or send [us] a letter at The San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco 94103.   

If you read the Chronicle or live in the Bay Area and you want to see Candorville remain in the Chronicle after this three-month period, you have to write to them and let them know. And for everyone else, check your local paper and see if it’s running Candorville in place of Doonesbury. If it’s not, they probably just haven’t heard of Candorville yet, so you might want to write to them and let them know. Now’s your chance to get Candorville in your favorite paper. Don’t pass it up.