Forty years ago today - May 1977.

Call me, "Hard as nails," if you like but I'm proud to announce that I survived this year's Eurovision Song Contest, last night.

Needless to say, I was torn between voting for the man stood up the ladder, wearing a horse's head, the dancing gorilla, the man doing a duet with himself and the rapping, yodelling Romanians, and so, I voted for none of them.

Obviously, the United Kingdom deserved to win, like it always does but once more we were thwarted, despite a highly impressive set of visuals and a bravura performance from a woman not anything like weird enough to stand a chance of actually getting any votes.

Of course, it wasn't always thus. Once there was a time when we did well in Eurovision.

That time was the 1970s.

And that's where we're going right now, to see what our favourite heroes were up to in the year when the UK finished second, thanks to Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran's Rock Bottom.

You don't want a rock bottom. It's a very uncomfortable thing to sit on. Just ask the Thing.

I remember little of this tale, even though I seem to keep coming across it wherever I go on the internet.

It's the same old routine for Conan. Everywhere he goes, there's peril. Why he doesn't sue his travel agent is beyond me.

I take it, from the cover blurb, that this is Arnim Zola's first ever appearance anywhere. Who would have thought, reading this comic, that, decades later, he'd be a movie star and played by Toby Jones?

Well, no one, obviously, as no one had heard of Toby Jones back then and, anyway, Toby Jones looks nothing like Arnim Zola.

I don't have a clue who the yellow individual attacking Cap is. I would assume it's an android but, as Zola is described as a, "Bio Fanatic," I have to conclude that it's not an android.

I have no idea at all as to what happens in this one, other than that the Owl is likely to be involved.

Hooray! After last month's reprint, the Brute is back.

I always liked the Brute. I liked the idea of an evil Reed Richards. Plus, he was suitably unpleasant for a villain.

I assume this isn't the same Mongu who showed up in the Hulk's early days and turned out to be a communist in a big costume, pretending to be an alien invader?

The world's most annoying super-doer is back, as Sunfire shows up.

No doubt we'll get twenty pages of bitter, nationalistic nonsense from him before he flees the scene, still ranting on about foreigners.

But why is Iron Man wearing what looks to be his Steve Ditko era armour?

I can't help feeling that calling Will-o'-The-Wisp a, "Superstar," might be a slight exaggeration. In fact, was he ever seen again after this story?

I would have assumed the answer is, "No," given that he died at the end of the tale but, knowing the world of comics, that's no guarantee he didn't go on to have a long and fulfilling career.

That's a bit poor. They're only on issue #6 and they're already reduced to using reprints.

I recall this tale from its Marvel UK printing but remember little of it. Didn't Morbius attack some woman near a bridge?

Thinking about it, there's a bridge on the cover. Maybe it's the same bridge.

Unless my memory betrays me, the cover to this issue was reproduced in the John Buscema/Stan Lee book How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.

I'm assuming those creatures on the cover are the High Evolutionary's evil New Men?