The Marvel Lucky Bag - February 1978.

Remember that scene in Flash Gordon, where Peter Duncan has to stick his hand in that tree stump and risk death, not knowing what nightmare toxic horror is going to be lurking in there?

Well, this feature is like that.

But with one difference.

Whatever is lurking in the Steve Does Comics' Tree Trunk of Nostalgia is bound to be nice, because it's produced by Marvel.

And it's the 1970s.

I don't know if I've read this one or not.

I do know that, "Stygyro," is a terrible name for a villain - possibly because it reminds me of little-remembered 1980s band Spyro Gyra who I recall inflicting some sort of easy listening cocktail music upon me when I was least expecting it.

I suspect it was a Spyro Gyra album that Peter Duncan found in that tree trunk. No wonder he keeled over and died.

I don't know. What? He's being attacked by a motorcyclist with a giant eyeball for a head? How would that man even pass his motorcycling proficiency test? He has no depth perception. He'd be crashing into things, all over the place.

For that matter, how's he even speaking? He's got no mouth. How's he even hearing things? He's got no ears.

I'm starting to think they haven't thought things through properly.

Hooray! It's the debut of the one significant character that I can remember coming out of Marvel's Godzilla strip, as Red Ronin shows up.

Not to be confused, of course, with Red Raven. You'd be a bit disappointed if you'd arranged for Red Ronin to turn up to tackle your thousand foot tall monster, and Red Raven showed up instead. Not least because you'd have to endure endless exposition about bird people, which seemed to be his sole topic of conversation.

At last! It's the debut of a comic book character like no other!

Well, admittedly, he's like Aquaman and the Sub-Mariner.

Unlike them, however, he had no staying power and his comic was cancelled after just seven issues. I suspect that Marvel readers were perfectly happy to settle for the one man from Atlantis they'd always already had.

I could be wrong but I think that, in this tale, Bereet's bag of tricks falls open and our heroes have to fight the various weirdnesses that lurk within it.

Whatever the tale's about, it has a Jim Starlin cover and that's good enough for me.

Of course, this villainous eyeball has a mouth. You see? Judo Jim, he thought things through.

I've never read White Fang, nor seen the movie adaptation of it.

I remember we had to read a section of it when we were at primary school but it involved him being savaged by a bulldog, which I didn't like, as I don't like my protagonists to be savaged by bulldogs.

It's this feature's obligatory reminder that not everything Marvel did in the 1970s involved super-heroes, as we get the company's take on the world's most famous ghost-busting dog.

Tragically, that dog made as big a mark on readers as the Man from Atlantis did and his book was cancelled after just nine issues.

There does seem to have been a trend for any 1970s Marvel comic based on a TV show to not even make it to ten issues before being dropped.

One of my happy childhood memories is of Ray Harryhausen's movie sending Lionel Jeffries to the moon to fight giant, talking ants and then kill them all with his Earth-born diseases.

Nowadays, in its first half, the film seems too whimsical for my liking and it takes too long to reach the moon but I still view it with fondness.

Interesting that the Selenites on that cover look nothing like the ones we were treated to in the film. It does make me wonder how they were described in the original book.

The wise-cracking duck takes on television clean-up campaigners.

And you can read my review of this very issue by clicking on this very link here.