ATTENTION SEATTLE READERS:

The Seattle Times is cancelling Candorville as of November 22. If you’re a Seattle Times reader and you want Candorville to stay in your paper, you’ve got to contact them NOW by writing to Timescomics@seattletimes.com. Tell them why you want it to stay, what Candorville means to you, and get all your Seattle-area friends, enemies, and exes (now I’m just being redundant) to do the same.

This is just Lemont’s luck: every ten steps forward, he runs into one giant leap back. Candorville’s added more than a dozen new papers in the last two months, but losing a voice in Seattle, the largest urban area in the Pacific Northwest, would be awful.

Sometimes papers cancel a strip to save money because they think readers won’t miss it. If nobody complains, it stays canceled. If enough people protest, they change their mind and return it. Other papers have canceled Candorville in the past, but almost every time, reader response has caused them to restore Candorville to the comics page.

If you want that to happen in Seattle, WRITE TO THEM NOW!

GOOD NEWS, SEATTLE READERS: We’ve just learned that because so many of you wrote in to ask for it, Candorville will return to the Seattle Times this month! It’ll be back starting either the week of the 19th or the 26th. If you want to thank the Times for reconsidering (or ask them to add the full-color Sunday “Candorville” as well), you can write to them at Timescomics@seattletimes.com. Hundreds of you cc’d me on the notes you sent to the Times, so I can’t thank you all individually. Thank you all for getting Candorville’s year off to a great start.

ATTN Monterey County-ites: The Monterey Herald will be dropping Candorville on January 4 to make room for a local cartoonist. From the looks of it, Candorville was targeted because it was a more recent addition. If you’d like to see Candorville stay in the paper, send an email right NOW to mheditor@montereyherald.com and tell them so.

Space on the comics page is limited, and whenever a paper adds a strip, they have to lose an existing one. Too often, they choose to axe one of the newest additions because they think it hasn’t been there long enough for anyone to miss it. That’s why your local comics page seems to be filled with comics that are older and more boring than your parents. That’s why people under 40 are more likely to go online for their comics than they are to open a paper. And since the comics page is usually cited as the #1 reason people buy newspapers, that’s one of the reasons papers themselves are dying.

Candorville is dropped a lot less often than most new comics, but it still happens. Almost always, more than enough readers write in to convince editors they underestimated Candorville’s fan base, and they reinstate it. You can make that happen again. Remember the moral of “It’s a Wonderful Life”: Every time you save Candorville, a dead cartoonist gets his wings. Or something like that.

The more papers that run Candorville, the longer I can keep producing Candorville. It’s as simple as that. If you value it, write to the Monterey Herald today and tell them so. That’s the only way they’ll know what you want to see in your paper.

Thanks, and Happy Holidays!
-Darrin