2000 AD - February 1981.

When the brave man or the fool looks within the dread Necronomicon - that blasphemous tome by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred - and seeks out the later chapters, in search of the one true defining horror above all other horrors, he will find a page.

That page must never be gazed upon.

For it contains a terror so fearsome that it could hurl a man over the cliff of insanity and onto the breakers of madness.

Upon that page are just two words.

February 1981.

For that was the month in which all lovers of anything that vaguely resembles music had to endure the nightmarish spectacle of Ultravox's era-defining Vienna being kept off the top of the UK singles chart for week after week after week.

At first, there was a respectability in Fate's treatment of the platter. After all, it was initially kept off the top spot by John Lennon's Woman.

But then it suddenly had to endure the ignominy of being kept from the pinnacle by Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce, a man who not only couldn't spell, "Your," but couldn't even be bothered to do the decent thing and end his name with an, "é."

Week after week, we huddled around our radios on Chart Day, waiting for the inevitable announcement that Vienna had finally risen to Number One, only to be told, yet again, that it was still at Number Two.

Few who survived that period have ever truly got over the ordeal, nor recovered their belief that there might, within this universe, be anything that could be called justice. If Watergate signalled the death of innocence for a generation of Americans, somehow, Vienna's endless run at Number Two did the same for a whole generation of Britons.

Over on the album chart, thankfully, things were decidedly less fraught, with neither of those acts vying for the Number One slot.

In fact, the album chart was topped by just two albums that month; John and Yoko's Double Fantasy and then Phil Collins' Face Value. How little we guessed at that time, that that latter album signalled the beginning of an insanely gigantic solo career for a man once perceived as being little more than Peter Gabriel's stand-in.

That's all well and good but what of sci-fi - and the comic which did more than any other to provide us with it?

As always, I know less than I should. But I do know the cover of Prog 198 is a wrap-around one, with its rear-half revealing that the pesky swarmers are standing on the bovver boot of a reclining skinhead. Quite what that's about is anyone's guess.

I also know that this era features a strip called Return to Armageddon, which seems to star a protagonist who's immortal and has been deformed by someone called the Destroyer, leading to him being put in a cage in a freak show, while customers are challenged to try and kill him. I've no memory of this strip at all but I can say that, even by the standards of 2000 AD, it sounds a bit grim.