April 18th, 1979 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

I shall start this post by giving a quick plug for Back in the Bronze Age, after they were kind enough to do the same for this blog. Over there, right now, you can discuss songs that bring a lump to your throat and whether super-heroes can get too powerful.

But some people can never get too powerful.

And that's politicians.

And so it was that, on this night of exactly forty years ago, BBC One and BBC Two were giving us hefty coverage of the then-current election campaign, with Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan and David Steel battling it out to see who was going to be next Prime Minister.

I will make the daring prediction that it will be Margaret Thatcher.

It's one of those rare occasions when I actually know what happens in an issue of Star Wars Weekly.

Luke rescues Leia from someone or other and then destroys someone's base or other, by some means or other. I do feel that's as fine a summary of a story as the world has ever seen.

Meanwhile, the Micronauts are still in our world and on the search for missing colleagues.

Then we have a Tales of the Watcher story in which the protagonist tells his psychiatrist he is haunted by a recurring dream in which he keeps meeting an alien.

Needless to say, the sensible shrink pooh-poohs the significance of his dream. After all, as he says, there's no way such a creature as a, "Human," could ever exist.

Elsewhere, Thanos has joined Warlock's battle with the Magus.

The UK-produced Hulk tales disappear without trace and we get a Sal Buscema offering in which our hero meets some bloke, via a bar fight, and decides to go and live with him - until the man's girlfriend alerts the authorities.

The Black Knight and Captain Britain meet The Walker and get more info on just what's going on.

Ant-Man defeats the commie agent who's out to discover his secret and produce an army of tiny communists - and discovers he was, in fact, a woman in disguise!

At the tale's end, Ant-Man rides off, slowly, on an ant, as agents of the law watch, speaking about him, with awe. It's one of the stupidest comic book panels I've ever seen and serves to highlight just how duff the whole concept of Ant-Man is.

I think SHIELD have finally succeeded in restoring dictatorship to a South American country.

The Eternals are still preparing for the arrival of the Celestials.

And Night-Raven has a contract taken out on him. That'll teach him to not annoy the wrong kind of people.

This is where our luck runs out, in terms of me having any idea what's going on, because all I can say about this issue is that Godzilla would appear to be eating a train.

So much for all those claims that railway food is no good.

And all I know about this issue is that Spidey and Moon Knight are still fighting the Maggia and the Cyclone.