This week, I have mostly been reading...

As you no doubt know, this blog ploughs through millions of comics every day in order to bring you opinions so powerful they could rock the world. Why, grown men themselves have been known to hide in cupboards to avoid the power of my fulminations.

But the truth is that even I don't always have strong enough feelings about a comic to bother reviewing it in full. Therefore, this is a selection of what I've been looking at lately that I can't bring myself to give a full write-up to.

The Avengers have their second outing and find themselves up against the Space Phantom who, for years, I always got mixed up with the Space Parasite.

Needless to say, in this tale, everyone gets everyone mixed up with the Space Phantom and by the end of it all, the Hulk's quit and the newly formed group are already a man down.

Just to make things worse for our heroes, not only are they a man short but the very next issue, they have to fight both him and the Sub-Mariner.

Bah! Who needs that pesky Hulk anyway? Thanks to the maturity levels that only Namor can supply, the Avengers return to full strength with the return of Captain America.

Batman has  his greatest failure!

Or perhaps he doesn't, as he encounters murder on a film set.

This is actually one of my favourite Batman tales from the era but I don't have anything to say about it that I haven't said about other Batman tales in other posts, therefore I shall not review it but merely express my liking for it.

Captain Marvel goes all cosmic and has his head redrawn by John Romita.

To be honest I've never been totally sure what Cosmic Awareness is but it's all good mythic stuff as Jim Starlin's Cosmic Cube saga rumbles on and we get some back-story for the solar system.

Jim Starlin's long-gone but Mar-Vell's Cosmic Awareness comes in handy as he uses it to beat the Super-Adaptoid and bring Rick Jones permanently back to our world.

Tragically, this means we shall have to endure more of Rick's singing career which mostly seems to consist of him declaring himself not to be John Denver.

I can confirm that I too am not John Denver.

Ka-Zar finds himself in a Savage Land re-enactment of Moby Dick as he helps a vengeance-seeking wally try to kill a giant river monster.

The story's concept might be pretty clichéd but it's beautifully drawn by Alfredo Alcala.

It's the Mighty World of Marvel but it might as well be called Daredevil Annual 1979, as our red clad hero finds himself in two tales.

The first is a very long but uninvolving team-up with the Black Panther. The second is shorter and stronger as the man without fear finds himself on a train, up against the Beetle and the Gladiator.