If you’re at all interested in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, it’s a good idea to invest in Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts. It’s a 26-volume set that contains every strip that saw publication, with around two years of strips per book. There’s a Kindle version if you’re strapped for shelf space, but if you’re shelling out for 26 volumes of anything, you may as well go for the physical edition.
Reading through Peanuts as a single unbroken run is a unique experience for anyone who’s a fan of the strip or the medium. You get to watch the characters and art evolve day by day, from the early gags featuring now-little-known characters like Violet to the slow appearance of what becomes the established crew. It’s also a useful way to start developing strong opinions about all these 75-year-old comic strip characters, like how Peppermint Patty doesn’t get nearly enough credit for being the best friend Charlie Brown ever had.
Friendship in Peanuts is one of its more incidental themes. As with a number of other subjects, the strip itself doesn’t often have that much to explicitly say on the topic, but there’s official merchandise that does. For example, there are at least two Peanuts collections based around it, such as 2016’s The Peanuts Guide to Friendship. The strip itself never makes a concrete statement about it… unless, arguably, Peppermint Patty is involved.
When Patty appears in Peanuts, it’s often to star in strips about her academic underachievement, but sometimes it’s about her unrequited, poorly-expressed crush on Charlie Brown. He, of course, has no idea. As far as he can tell, as a frequently-distracted eight-year-old, Patty’s just ridiculously friendly.
If you read enough of Peanuts, however, especially once it hits the 1970s or so, you start to get the impression that the core cast mostly drive each other crazy. They’re all eccentrics in their own childlike ways, and while Charlie Brown’s got his buddies like Linus and Franklin, Peanuts’ core drive to keep Charlie Brown miserable means that he’s more often sharing panel time with frenemies like Lucy. Even Snoopy has a more weirdly adversarial relationship with Charlie Brown than you’d think.
Patty, on the other hand, has Chuck’s back like a jacket whenever she’s around. She’s as eccentric as any other member of the core Peanuts cast, but her eccentricity isn’t there to make Charlie Brown’s life difficult. Most of the time.
A good example comes from a month-long storyline in 1979 where Charlie Brown ends up in the hospital. It’s never established why, aside from that he’s sick, but much of what makes the storyline remarkable is how it affects Charlie Brown’s friends and family. Lucy admits that she’s actually his friend, although naturally not to him. Snoopy belatedly gets to wondering where the round-headed kid went, because Snoopy is nothing if not stuck inside his own head. Most crucially, both Patty and her sidekick Marcie make the trip across town to visit Charlie Brown at the hospital.
“It’s a well-known fact”
In another certified “where the hell are these kids’ parents?” moment, Patty and Marcie are told they can’t personally visit Charlie Brown in the hospital because they’re too young. Instead, they opt to sit outside the hospital on a park bench and watch what they assume to be 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.
While Patty and Marcie’s appearances in the hospital arc do fit with one of Patty’s usual shticks, where she immediately makes some random decision and sticks with it no matter what, it jumps out on a long read. This is quietly one of the nicest things anyone does for Charlie Brown in the Peanuts canon. Patty and Marcie aren’t there to cause problems or score cheap gags at Chuck’s expense. They’re there to support their friend, full stop.
For a strip like Peanuts that’s built its reputation on its wholesomeness, its actual wholesome moments are few and far between. That’s usually reserved for T-shirts, posters, or the animated specials. As a result, when something genuinely touching does happen in Peanuts, it actually still has some degree of impact. That’s a lesson Schulz knew that many of his imitators failed to grasp.
If you wanted to get a thesis statement about friendship as a whole out of Peanuts, though, you could do a lot worse than this arc. Patty has her incidental strangenesses, same as any other kid in Peanuts, but we should all have a friend like her.