I came across this strip in our paper in early January, and I thought it would be an easy algebra problem. I gave it a few minutes and gave up, just like Peppermint Patty. It turns out, I was more interested in the fruit because I had been feeding my roses with ‘banana water’ for the last few months. I liked the idea of recycling, and heard that the potassium and other elements in the skins are beneficial to plants, particularly roses.

I remember Sparky saying once that he had a book with these puzzles, so I wondered if looking at the book for this puzzle had set his mind on other puzzles that would show up in the coming weeks’ comic strips.

To find that answer, I turned to the quarterly compilation we receive from  Andrews McMeel with Go Comics. They maintain a library of 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, which they issue quarterly to subscribing newspapers. To do this, they must adjust the strips (in this case from 1979) to the 2026 calendar, making sure holiday strips (and don’t forget Beethoven’s Birthday) fall on the correct day.

Going through the quarterly strips took me down the proverbial rabbit hole, and I forgot the banana peel issue…

Sparky followed up the January banana peel puzzle with two more involving Peppermint Patty on February 20 and 21. In this case, Sparky brilliantly gives the square root problem to Woodstock, who solves it in a jiffy.

Peppermint Patty has just the right amount of honesty and naivete to be a perfect foil for these strips.  I could also imagine Sparky being amused by using Woodstock to solve the equation.

To top off these two sets of puzzles, Sparky added the classic philosophical puzzle, which may go back to St. Tomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, regarding the number of angels standing on the head of a pin.

It is a beautiful use of this classic puzzle, and Charlie Brown gets his chance to shine as the ‘teacher.’

Were these all from the same source? I guess I will never know. To my knowledge, there was no puzzle book that drew the attention of the various archivists when choosing books to display in the Museum from the collection of 1,500+ in Sparky’s office.

In between the puzzles, Sparky drew two weeks of Red Baron Strips. In the first week of these comic strips, Snoopy tries to engage a French ‘lass’ with his phrasebook French.  She speaks back, and in his surprise, he swallows his phrase book.

It had been only four years since we had retraced the steps of Sparky’s 20^th Armored Division in Northern France, and the movie Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown, the special based on that trip, had come out a year or so before, following that same story, so France must have been on his mind.

Sparky ended the quarter in March with another week of Red Baron strips. However, now Snoopy is in Germany, and rather than a stranger passing by, he is trying to engage the neighborhood kids, who are not at all welcoming.

At that time, Sparky and I were taking a German class at night at the Santa Rosa Junior College.  I do recommend taking a language class with your partner; it gives you built-in study help.  But Sparky complained to our friends, when the subject of the class came up, that when we had to recite in class, I drowned him out, and that my pronunciation was worse than his. (While I, of course, thought I was helping him.)

 

Another notable item in this quarterly submission is a three-day storyline featuring Franklin, Marcie, and Peppermint Patty at school.

This is now ten years after Franklin had been introduced, and Sparky knew that it was important to vary the characters because readers all have their different favorite characters, and that to keep “the symphony going,” it is important to call on different instruments.

And finally, back to the banana…can it be that the peel weighs an eighth of an ounce?

 

 

—Jean Schulz