Peppermint Patty Remains Charlie Brown’s Best Friend 60 Years After Debut

If you have any interest in Charles Schulz and his work on Peanuts, investing in Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts is a worthwhile choice. This 26-volume set contains every published strip, featuring about two years of strips in each book. A Kindle version exists for anyone low on shelf space, but purchasing physical copies makes sense for a 26-volume collection.

Reading through Peanuts as a single unbroken run offers a unique experience for fans of the strip and the comic medium. Readers watch the characters and art evolve day by day, moving from early gags with characters like Violet to the formation of the established crew. This format helps readers develop opinions about these 75-year-old comic strip characters, such as the realization that Peppermint Patty deserves more credit as the best friend Charlie Brown ever had.

Friendship is an incidental theme in Peanuts. The strip itself rarely addresses the topic explicitly, but official merchandise touches on it through collections like 2016’s The Peanuts Guide to Friendship. The strip makes no concrete statement on the matter, unless Peppermint Patty is involved.

When Patty appears in Peanuts, she often stars in storylines about her academic underachievement or her unrequited, poorly expressed crush on Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown, as a frequently distracted eight-year-old, has no idea about the crush and simply views Patty as remarkably friendly.

Reading enough of Peanuts, particularly from the 1970s onward, reveals that the core cast mostly drives each other crazy. The characters are eccentrics in childlike ways. Charlie Brown has buddies like Linus and Franklin, but the core premise of keeping Charlie Brown miserable means he more frequently shares panel time with frenemies like Lucy. Even Snoopy maintains an adversarial relationship with Charlie Brown.

Patty supports Charlie Brown whenever she is around. She is as eccentric as any other member of the core Peanuts cast, but her eccentricity rarely makes Charlie Brown’s life difficult.

A clear example appears in a month-long storyline from 1979 where Charlie Brown ends up in the hospital. The reason for his illness is never specified, but the storyline highlights how the event affects his friends and family. Lucy admits she is actually his friend, though never to his face. Snoopy eventually wonders where the round-headed kid went. Most importantly, Patty and her sidekick Marcie travel across town to visit Charlie Brown at the hospital.

“It’s a well-known fact”

Patty and Marcie are told they cannot visit Charlie Brown inside the hospital because they are too young. Instead, they sit outside on a park bench and watch what they assume is his window until the light goes out.

“It’s a well-known fact, Marcie, that a patient will recover faster if he knows a friend is staring up at his room,” Patty says.

Patty and Marcie’s appearances in the hospital arc fit Patty’s established habit of making a random decision and sticking to it, but the moment stands out during a long read. This stands as quietly one of the nicest things anyone does for Charlie Brown in the Peanuts canon. Patty and Marcie do not cause problems or score cheap gags at his expense. They arrive to support their friend.

Peanuts built a reputation on wholesomeness, but actual wholesome moments within the strip are rare and usually reserved for T-shirts, posters, or animated specials. When something genuinely touching happens in the strip, it retains an emotional impact. Charles Schulz understood a lesson that many imitators failed to grasp.

Anyone searching for a thesis statement about friendship within Peanuts can look to this storyline. Patty has her oddities like any other child in the strip, but everyone benefits from having a friend like her.

Source: Polygon