Pickled weddings by Sean Horejs, Outpost Contributor   Dan and Sylvia are planning a wedding, and everyone is invited! It's going to be in all the newspapers! Well, at least 220 of them. Confused? Dan and Sylvia are two of the many characters that make up cartoonist Brian Crane's comic strip Pickles. In recent months, Crane has focused his strip's characteristically lighthearted humor and sarcasm on one of life's most joyous events, a wedding. Crane, a Sparks resident, began writing Pickles in 1990 and since then it has been added by over 220 newspapers worldwide. Crane's editor, Suzanne Whelton of the Washington Post Writer's Group and coincidentally a bride-to-be, said Pickles consistently places at the top of reader surveys, beating out such comic heavyweights as "Beetle Bailey," "Peanuts," and "Blondie." "Brian's humor is consistent," Whelton said. "His strips are funny day after day. Not many other cartoonists can do that." Pickles has also been popular locally. According to Reno Gazette-Journal reporter Richard LeComte, results of a 1996 Gazette-Journal reader survey showed 90 percent of the 3,000 Northern Nevada residents polled named Pickles among their favorites. So, why a wedding? Ask the readers. "Brian gets inundated with fan mail asking when they (Dan and Sylvia) are getting married," Whelton said. "It's been a long time coming." Crane introduced Dan to Pickles readers in the summer of 1995 as Sylvia's "knight in shining armor." Dan saved Sylvia from an attacking bear and a romance began. Two and a half years, and several hundred strips later, Dan proposed. And what a proposal! While trying to think of a unique way for Dan to "pop the question," Crane remembered back to his days at an Idaho publishing company where one of his co-workers shipped himself, while wearing a gorilla suit, in a box to his girlfriend. When she opened the box, the man jumped out holding a ring and proposed. Crane decided it would be perfect for the strip. However, Crane made sure Dan's plans weren't quite as smooth. Sylvia, who lives with her parents, Earl and Opal Pickles, was out of town the day Dan scheduled his "delivery." Sylvia's parents decided to leave the package alone until she returned home, leaving Dan trapped inside the box. Wait, it gets worse. Sylvia called the police bomb squad to investigate the "suspicious" package. A policeman arrived and told her, while Dan listened inside the box, that he would take the box outside of town and detonate it. "Hold everything!" Dan yelled hysterically. Sylvia finally discovered Dan in the box and he proposed. Some of Crane's inspirations have been more recent and much "closer to home." "It's been somewhat serendipitous," Crane said. "When I started doing the wedding strips, my son came home from college with a girl. Now theyíre getting married. "I've gotten to watch it all happen in front of me, and I've put some of it into my strip." Indeed, the timing couldn't be better. Whelton, whose own wedding is less than two weeks away, has also inspired some of Crane's work. "I've given Brian (Crane) some ideas for the strip," Whelton said, "Like the one that shows Opal asking Sylvia whether she plans to take Dan's last name." Whelton plans to keep her own last name instead of taking her husband's for personal reasons. "My identity is very much tied to my name, my family, my history," Whelton said. I decided many years ago that I wanted to keep my name &endash; even if I married a Kennedy or a Rockefeller." It isn't difficult to find the humor in Crane's work, it often makes him laugh as he writes. His favorite line? Enter Earl. "Before I got married I was my own worst enemy," Earl said, "Now, of course, my wife has that job." With ideas like Earl's, one wonders how long it'll be before Crane draws "the divorce." copyright May 1998 Nevada Outpost http://www.jour.unr.edu/outpost