December 29th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

If the internet's to be believed, nothing at all interesting happened anywhere in the world on this day in 1976.

Nor was there anything interesting on the TV.

Therefore, I shall plunge into my latest adventure in blogging, with the air of carefree abandon that can only manifest itself in the eternally perplexing limbo between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Captain Britain showing the fighting spirit that's made him a legend.

After all these years, I still don't have the slightest clue who Dr Synne is. I assume he's not related to the character played so ably by Peter Cushing in the Hammer movie Night Creatures. That character used to ride around on a horse disguised as a skeleton. I doubt if any of Captain Britain's early foes ever had the style to ride around on a horse disguised as a skeleton.

It's a rare John Buscema cover for Daredevil.

Come to think of it, it's a rare Daredevil cover for The Mighty World of Marvel. It was always a pleasant change to see someone other than the Hulk being allowed on the front of the book.

Then again, it was always a pleasant change to see a decent cover of any kind on The Mighty World of Marvel. No doubt, next week we'll see a return to covers that look like they've been drawn by people holding their pencils with their feet.

I still have no recollection at all of Conan ever having appeared in the pages of Planet of the Apes. I suppose it made sense for him to be there though, what with the equally loin-cloth loving Ka-Zar already being present.

In retrospect, the fact that our favourite monkey mag was having to recycle Planet of the Apes movie adaptations it had already reprinted should have been a warning that Marvel UK was running out of new Apes material to put in the comic and that its days were therefore numbered but, somehow, I don't think that occurred to me at the time.

I remember the Liberty Legion as being a less interesting copy of the Invaders.

Needless to say, this made me very uninterested in them indeed.

I do wonder why, instead of standing there, narrating his life story to rats, Spider-Man doesn't just escape up that ladder to his left. Clearly, he's been taking defeatism lessons from Brian Braddock.