Forty years ago today - March 1979.

What's that?

It's a finger.

What's it doing?

It's beckoning me to follow it into the dark passageways of Recall and look at what our favourite Marvel heroes were up to in the books that bear the cover date of this month in 1979.

Conan turns into Ka-Zar and teams up with a lion, in order to rescue Bêlit from her evil captors.

While he's doing that, she's trying to get her fellow female prisoners to rise up against their oppressors.

Conan, meanwhile, fights an electric eel and beats up a leopard.

If I remember right, I think Cap falls out with SHIELD and does some vacuuming.

Meanwhile, The Corporation are still up to no good and some bad guy or other is doing the Hate-Monger thing and getting a crowd of people, including Sharon Carter, to want to kill foreigners.

Hooray! Gene Colan gets to draw Death-Stalker - the villain he was born to draw - as Daredevil wakes from his coma, to help the Avengers take on the fedora-wearing heel.

Romantics will be pleased to know it all leads to him getting back together with the Black Widow.

Sadly, determined party-poopers the Ani-Men are out to kidnap Matt Murdock.

Three of the FF go off to help some aliens fight the Skrulls. Why do I get the feeling there's more going on with that than meets the eye?

Meanwhile, left behind, the Torch goes to college and finds himself a target of a mystery villain.

That villain is The Monocle!

Who would have thought we'd ever get to see him again?

No one. That's who.

I've no idea what happens in this one but I gather that SHIELD are involved.

Is it me or is that a genuinely terrible cover?

Tony Stark's happily getting himself drunk when his plane's hit by a flying tank.

It turns out it was thrown by the Sub-Mariner - and the inevitable fight breaks out.

But Starky's got more problems than he realises because it turns out Peter Cushing's sabotaging his armour, by remote control.

At least, he looks like Peter Cushing.

Therefore, in my head, he's Peter Cushing.

Professor Smythe's gained control of the Man-Wolf's mind and is using him to try and kill JJJ.

Needless to say, Spidey's not going to stand for that. And doesn't.

Needless to say, JJJ shows no gratitude to him at any point in the story.

Apparently, in this issue, Carrion trashes Peter Parker's apartment.

What a bounder. You can see why he's viewed as being one of Spidey's greatest foes.

Wasn't Carrion the clone of Professor Warren, or am I thinking of someone else?

Moses Magnum is still trying to destroy Japan, for some reason I can't recall.

With a grim inevitability, the X-Men are having more trouble stopping him than they really should have. This is, after all, a man who was stopped by Luke Cage. No disrespect to Luke but he's not the X-Men.

It's the big one. Henry Peter Gyrich shows up and, on behalf of the US government, decides to cut the Avengers' roster to a more manageable size.

Obviously, this doesn't go down well with our heroes.

Not so obviously, they go along with it, like a bunch of Muppets.

Can't they spot a bad guy when they see one?

The Space Phantom recruits Thor's help to save his own people.

Inevitably, it all turns out to be a trick.

What the trick is and how Thor gets out of it, I don't remember.

I'm sure it's highly dramatic though.

STOP PRESS! In response to a comments section request from FB, I'm adding a couple of panels from Iron Man #120, which features a villain who's clearly Peter Cushing and a pollution-happy military officer who seems to be Stan Lee.