Actually, the feedback loop (pardon the pun) described by Zonker in Sunday's hash-sundae strip is exactly why they outlawed hash brownies in the coffieshops in the Netherlands.

Oh my. A fighter escort? Now that takes me back -- four decades plus. Our fighter escorts were Cobras when we were making rescue pickups in SH-3As (Nam, baby, nam). I don't know if I should call them fond memories but they were, well, comforting...

Zipper (Dawg) & Jeff may be this century's Mutt & Jeff. Greetings from downunder.

This Red Rascal storyline is taking me straight back to the glory days of Duke and Honey as they bumbled their way through what Christopher Hitchens has called "the armpits of the world." I wonder if it is too much to hope that Honey is going to somehow turn up and save the day...

I am really enjoying all the story elements you are juggling these days. Talk about multi-tasking. It's like channel-hopping at a time when all your favorites are on at once! The quality is undiminished and the characters, as usual, are real as life. After 40 years you are not coasting at all. Thanks!

From Japan I say thank you for contributing some normalcy to my life in the midst of a great deal of current abnormalcy.

Pretty edgy doing a marijuana strip on Sunday.  By the way, I think the association between eating and smoking herb is merely a stereotype. The stuff always made me more cerebral, musical -- never hungry.

I've just finished the massive 40-year retrospective, and it has enriched my two-decade on/off Doonesbury experience wonderfully. I now finally understand who is related to who, even if I have no clue how old everyone is. Thanks, GBT.

I'm left to wonder how powerful our print media has grown when my heart pounds over the fate of Jeff and Dawg. Thanks for the memories!

It's tempting to think "Oh, it's only a comic strip..." and consign the Red Rascal and his "magical realism" to a safe, separate comic world where real soldiers and real lives and real history would never be mixed up in "a comic book mission." But then one recalls the history of the CIA, and characters like Barker and Liddy and Hunt, to name only a few who come readily to mind.

I'm a Nam Vet who's still coming home. I'm worrying about Ray. Took me over a year to get off benzos (on them for 16 years). NASTY NASTY withdrawal. Help Ray, will ya?

I looked it up. It's going to take a lot to un-look it up.

Just when I thought we'd pretty much figured out magic realism (at least for bookclub purposes), along comes the Red Rascal. It doesn't get any better than this!

This strip is as reliable a pleasure as the Patrick O'Brian books. Thank you!

I read these comments by my fellow involved citizens and am amazed by the way these toons touch our hearts and minds. This is the most exciting the strip has ever been, in my most humble opinion. I started way back in the dawn -- didn't understand because I wasn't smart enough -- and drifted off for a while only to become obsessed in middle age. Please keep it up until we are too old to see anymore. Since we are the same age you probably won't be wanting to do this about the same time I won't be able to read it.

Tell me that the Red Rascal and his sidekick are "Soldiers of Misfortune," that they too, will jump into the moment with an AK-47, a bottle of whiskey and a backpack stuffed with cash! Ahhhh, let the insanity reign supreme and the storyline unravel as it may...

OMG, he's got his superhero turban on... This is really happening.

I have a deep foreboding about Ray's future. I hope he makes it back. I fear he won't.

I don't know if I find it more disturbing that I recognize all those drugs Ray gets or that I'm on half of them. I have two observations. First, whoever's giving Ray his "little buddies" needs to do a meds review. Clonapin and Valium are both benzodiazapams, and addictive -- not to be taken together. As to the memory issues, Ambien is in the same class of drugs as Rohypnol the (illegal) date rape drug. It doesn't put you to sleep unless you lay down and close your eyes immediately. Instead, you'll walk around doing your thing for three hours and have almost no recall of it the next day. The effect, in my personal experience, is cumulative. If Ray took all that at once, he'd be another Heath Ledger. Just sayin'.

Ray is breaking my heart. I have students who have to interrupt their education for multiple deployments and are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan depressed, angry, and, though I don't ask, probably on meds. Thanks for taking time to call attention to the Rays. These men and women are going to be some time healing.