I got a number of favorable responses last year when I posted an article entitled "1997: Year in review." So here is the next installment! I'll start, as before, with statistics about how many times various characters appeared: 167 Snoopy 140 Charlie Brown 89 Lucy 87 Rerun 59 Sally 53 Linus 51 Peppermint Patty 44 Woodstock 41 Marcie 25 Spike 11 Schroeder 8 Naomi 7 Andy 7 Olaf 7 Girl classmate of Rerun 3 Franklin (1/11, 2/26, 9/16) 1 Roy (4/18) 1 The school building (8/22) 1 The little red-haired girl (5/25) The most shocking entry here, and indeed the most shocking news of the year, is the appearance of the little red-haired girl! She is drawn only in silhouette, but still, this is totally unheard of. The storyline in which she appears is one of Schulz's best creative efforts of the year. Charlie Brown comes oh-so-close to dancing with the little red-haired girl, and even dreams of dance steps in his sleep. But Peppermint Patty and Marcie barge in on him at the critical moment, and Snoopy (with a new alter ego: Gatsby) dances with the little red-haired girl instead. When Charlie Brown finally extricates himself, Snoopy has gotten sick from drinking too much punch and they have to leave (before the nurse takes off Snoopy's "dog suit"!). Poor Charlie Brown's smooth lines ("Save me the waltz") again bring him no joy. Another notable entry in the above list is Naomi, who debuted this year. Spike stands around in his Mickey Mouse shoes hoping to be picked up by a beautiful Hollywood-type girl, and winds up being seized by Naomi, who takes him to an animal clinic, where Spike is diagnosed with distemper. Meanwhile, Andy and Olaf, who have been wandering around for the longest time looking for Spike (trying at one point to enlist Mickey Mouse's help by standing near a pay phone and barking, thinking that Mickey Mouse would hear them), walk right by. Will they ever hook up? Some other oddities: the school building has "uttered" its first thoughts in years, and we have learned the name of yet another Beagle Scout: Roy. Recall that Charlie Brown met a Roy at camp once. This is the first time that two different characters in Peanuts have had the same name (except possibly for Leland, but that's another story). Among the minor characters, this seems to be Franklin's year; he didn't appear at all in 1997, while "Pigpen" and Lydia, who *did* appear in 1997, did not appear in 1998. The little girl with braids in Rerun's class continues to make a strong showing (for a minor character), but remains unnamed. It's worth mentioning two other startling strips that appeared this year. On Veterans Day (11/11), Willie and Joe from Up Front were seen, and Nat Gertler suggests that Schulz may have invited Bill Mauldin himself to draw the characters. And on 8/5, Rerun asks, "Am I buttering too loud for you?" ---a famous line from a classic Peanuts strip. The deliberate reuse of an old punchline seems inexplicable until one notices the inscription "HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMY." Does anyone recall any other Happy Birthday strips? [Note added later: the alt.comics.peanuts FAQ now has a section on the Happy Birthday Amy strips] Apart from the above, 1998 strikes me as being notable not so much for memorable storylines but for a subtler feature: the development of Rerun as a character. Notice his 87 appearances, up from 58 appearances in 1997. In addition to his continued longing for a dog, he has decided that he would like a bicycle, and was disappointed that he didn't get one while trick-or- treating. More significantly, he has started complaining more about Lucy and Linus, who have sometimes ejected him from the house (1/30, 2/3). We learn that his enthusiasm for art far outstrips his ability: his picture of two armies fighting during a storm looks like a duck landing in water (2/24), his stadium with 60,000 fans has only ten fans (9/11), his dogs are purple (10/14), and his pictures of Santa Claus look like Daffy Duck (12/16). He is getting over his hide-under-the-bed habit: when Lucy talks under his bed, he startles her from behind, "Who are you talking to?" (9/7; one of my favorite strips of the year). Lucy makes him hoe (3/17), which is reminiscent of Lucy's coercion of Linus and Snoopy into laboring in her garden. Finally, he once again appears on the baseball field (6/14), making us wonder if he will once again have as dramatic an impact on Charlie Brown's team as when he gambled away their only win back in the 70's. Meanwhile, what's up with Linus? Why is he hearing coyotes all the time (1/23, 4/16)? What's the deal with all these little snowmen? Is he totally losing his grip on reality? Schulz continues his habit of alluding to famous people---Lindbergh (3/11), Tiger Woods (3/20), F. Scott Fitzgerald (5/21), Haydn (5/24), Thomas Wolfe (7/13), Ty Cobb (7/17; Lucy thinks he's a woman), Scott Adams (10/22), Moses (6/15, 10/18)---and famous works of literature and film---Gatsby (5/21), In Flanders Fields (7/29), Casablanca (4/26), Citizen Kane (11/6), and Twas the Night Before Christmas (11/25). Around April I started keeping track of the number of panels that Schulz uses for each strip. The statistics follow (I haven't bothered separating out Sundays from weekday strips, sorry): # of panels: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 # of strips: 36 11 90 72 18 1 2 13 8 9 2 1 3 1 Finally, 1998 has also seen continued new twists on old standbys, but rather than list all these here, let me just conclude by mentioning some of my favorite strips this year. 1. Charlie Brown patiently performs the role of yelling messages between Lucy in the outfield and Schroeder at the plate. "Tell her I wouldn't go over to her house if they were giving away sports cars, thousand dollar bills, and chocolate sundaes!" Charlie Brown turns around, begins, "He says..." and then stops to think. He turns back. "You wouldn't?" (7/12) 2. Charlie Brown helps Sally with her homework but gets all the answers wrong. Sally suggests that an appropriate punishment would be "life imprisonment without the possibility of parole." Charlie Brown: "Isn't there more to life than getting the answers right?" Shortly afterwards in front of the principal's office: "There isn't more to life than getting the answers right.." (5/5, 5/6) 3. Rerun: "There's a great big alligator sneaking up behind you..April Fool!" Lucy: "April Fools' Day was yesterday." Rerun: "It took me all night to think of that.." (4/2) 4. Snoopy barks at Sally and Charlie Brown at night, but they just tell him to go to sleep. Snoopy: "You try to warn them that the world has gone mad, but they won't listen.." Here's to another year of great strips!