May 21st, 1980 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.

***

Big lumps of rock.

Have you ever found yourself looking at one and wondering what primal urges led someone to put it there?

If so, you aren't alone and, on this night in 1980, BBC Two's Chronicle took a look at the subject, concentrating on a stone circle newly-found in Aberdeenshire, comparing and contrasting it with the better-known circle at Avebury.

BBC One, meanwhile, was looking at a somewhat less mysterious British icon, as The Risk Business asked whether there was a future for the double-decker bus.

It is, of course, to George Lucas' eternal shame that neither stone circles nor double-decker buses featured in The Empire Strikes Back which was released that very week.

No doubt, we were all going to see it...

...provided we could actually afford to. This was, after all, the week in which UK inflation rose to a positively vertiginous 21.8%.

In the United States, Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State, killing 57 people and causing $3 billion worth of damage.

Back in Britain, that week, Joy Division's singer Ian Curtis was found hanged, having killed himself.

As far as I can make out, in a Michael Golden drawn tale, Leia and Luke find themselves trapped inside a living spaceship that's out to obliterate them.

Back in the Marvel Universe, Man-Wolf's also on a spaceship, and also in a fight for survival, although he's now back in his guise of John Jameson.

John Jameson is, as we know, an astronaut. So, presumably, he'll feel far more at home on there than his shaggy alter-ego did.

In this week's Tales of the Watcher, an unpleasant man travels to an alien planet, in search of its legendary treasure but discovers the treasure's actually a fountain of youth whose waters he's unknowingly imbibed, causing him to quickly revert to infanthood.

This week, the Doctor visits an alien zoo, which is nice for him.

I don't know whether that ties in to the main story which is still The Dogs of Doom.

We get a text article about the notorious Horns of Nimon.

And there's an adventure reprinted from Tales to Astonish #33 in which a scientist builds a time machine to escape the perils of the modern world - only to discover that every era has its perils.

It sounds to me like he'd have been better off investing in a history book, rather than a time machine.

We also get an article about The Master, a text story involving K-9, and a strip about a Yeti.

Because you the reader demanded it, Marvel's top two super-hero weeklies have failed and now merge to produce a comic which reunites the original stars of Mighty World of Marvel, as well as introducing Spider-Woman and the savage She-Hulk!

How can we resist so much spidery-hulky goodness?

We can't!

At least, that's the hope of Marvel UK.

Hooray! We can win two Raleigh bicycles!

They'd better be Choppers or I'll feel highly disappointed when mine arrives.

All I know of this week's contents is the Howling Commandos have organised an escape from a prisoner of war camp - an escape which keeps being jeopardised by the fact that one of the people they're trying to rescue is a trigger-happy maniac who just can't resist shooting at Germans when he's supposed to be hiding.