Awhile back, I posted about a persistent mystery: I had long been convinced that somewhere in a Howard the Duck comic, Howard encounters Tim Leary and is given acid. He is institutionalized and looking for "the key," which Leary interprets somewhat playfully, prefiguring one of the episodes in the comic where Howard hallucinates (say during his "quack up" period). I remembered all this vividly because I'd had to ask my father to explain what was going on, being barely a teenager at the time and unfamiliar with Leary, let alone acid. I decided, a few months ago, to resolve this mystery - could a Marvel comic, however hip and subversive, actually have gotten away with an acid reference back then? Searching in vain through HTD back issues in a few comic stores led me to consider the possibility that I'd gotten something wrong - that maybe it was in a different comic book, perhaps something more underground and drug-friendly, say. Thanks to a friend of a friend - a nod goes out to Eamon, with the hope that I'm spelling his name right - I have discovered that in fact, it wasn't even a comic book at all. The Tim Leary, acid-as-the-key episode is actually from Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams, which I saw theatrically with my Dad when it was released back in 1981.
Mystery solved!
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