March 20th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

It's been a terrible week for those of us with aspirations to rule the world, what with it having contained the Ides of March. I had to go into hiding, in case my horde of deadly enemies decided to descend on me, en masse, and use me as a human pin cushion.

Fortunately, I was not alone in my hiding place.

I was accompanied by The Past.

The Past, the only thing guaranteed never to try and kill me.

But what of that Past? What of Marvel UK forty years ago this very week?

The Lady Liberators are still tangling with the forces of evil.

I wonder what the answers were to the Marvel Mastermind quiz?

Then again, I wonder what the questions were.

It's one of my favourite UK Planet of the Apes covers, as apes prove they can't tell the difference between toads and slugs.

Still, he knows to always shoot things in the nostrils, and that's what matters.

I am intrigued by just who it is Drac's ordering the Werewolf and Man-Thing to strike.

As, apart from him, they're the only two people in the room, the only people they can strike are each other.

I'm no military expert but getting your allies to kill each other seems a somewhat self-defeating tactic to me. Oh well, at least now we know why he always loses.

Then again, it was the 1970s. Maybe he wanted them to go on strike. I hear those monsters can be quite low-paid and have unsociable working hours.

In other news, I really do like the way the cover's drawn. Unusually for a Marvel UK frontage, it has a certain style about it.

If I remember rightly, this is the epic in which Spider-Man loses his mask and has to wear a polythene one bought from a fancy dress shop, which he can't breathe through.

I think he also gets an ulcer while he's at it.

And then Hammerhead shows up.

Poor old Spidey. He never does things the easy way.

It's not only Dracula who's finding himself with an unusually stylish cover this week, as someone who seems to be a bit of a Steranko fan has a go at creating one for The Titans.

Now I'm confused. I assume the Psycho-Man story is the one where the Silver Surfer finds himself in the Microverse and the FF have to go looking for him in order to appease Galactus. But I thought MWOM had already reprinted that tale several months earlier.

As for other matters, I always had a liking for Mr Fear. He was one of the few early DD villains who had any actual potential. Did he turn into the Death-Stalker later on, or was that someone else?