Forty years ago today - January 1981.

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

***

The year 2021 pushes on as we march into that realm which was once the future.

But, right now, it's the past which interests us.

A past that is packed with incident, heroics and villainy.

And also packed with bafflingness, as the Beast and Wonder Man get lost in the middle of town and discover a colony of artificial organisms living in the sewers.

Although the organisms are friendly, the locals think they're evil and attack them, causing their destruction.

Then it turns out it all never happened. Or possibly it did. Or possibly it didn't.

Or something.

Anyone who can explain this tale is a better reviewer than I am.

Years after he threw her into a sewer, Conan re-encounters Jenna the not-so-trustworthy good-time girl from Rogues in the House.

Sadly, she's succumbed to a form of deadly leprosy inflicted by an evil sorcerer from space.

And he's been doing it to loads of people.

Needless to say, Conan gives him the stabbing he's asking for, and Jenna gets her good health back.

Elektra makes her stab-happy debut, as we're given a flashback to Matt Murdock's college days and his and her romance.

You know the one. The one in which he showed her his super-powers and went on a mission to rescue her kidnapped father.

But, of course, we don't need a flashback to it because we all remember it from when it was in Origins of Marvel Comics.

Oh. Wait. Hold on. For some reason, none of this was mentioned in Origins of Marvel Comics.

I blame Stan Lee.

Finally having got done with fighting space Vikings, the FF are back in civilisation and having to stop a rampant robot that's under the control of some evil person or other.

I think this is all here to wrap up a storyline from whatever that cancelled series was about the people with the giant Japanese robots.

The Hulk's back in town, and Don Blake decides only Thor can stop him - and prove, at last, which of them is the stronger.

Except he doesn't. The fight comes to an abrupt halt when Thor decides it's more important he prevents a road tunnel from collapsing and the Hulk gets bored and leaves.

It's a very special day for some of us, when the Tinkerer's alien allies reappear.

Except, this time, they're not working for the Tinkerer. They're working with Mysterio.

I hope this isn't one of those tales which claims they're not real aliens and are just men dressed up, because that is a reality I refuse to accept.

As far as I can recall, we also get to meet Aunt May's new fiance who, for once, isn't a man with mechanical arms.

It's the far and distant future.

Probably 1995 or something.

And mutants have been hunted to near-extinction, by the Sentinels.

Needless to say, our heroes do the obvious and send Kitty Pryde back to the present, in order to halt the sequence of events which created the apocalyptical world she knows.

Captain America's back in England.

And Baron Blood's back from the dead!

It may be a tale stuffed with inaccurate portrayals of Britain (do village bobbies really investigate serial killings?) but it's still a tale it's impossible to not love.

When Thor helps save a priest and his church from destruction at the hands of local gangsters, the priest rediscovers his faith in the Christian God, even though you would have thought it would merely give him faith in Norse gods.

Hooray! We get to see Iron Man's brand new space-armour when someone with a satellite death-rays a small town into oblivion, and Shell Head goes to investigate.

But what's this? When he gets into space, that satellite turns out to have the word Roxxon written on the side of it, in gigantic letters?

Thanks to last issue's scrap between Spidey and Subby, a sailor's now turned into the unstoppable Hydro-Man, a villain who is to water what Flint Marko is to sand.

How can our hero stop such a being?

And does it involve heat?

At least it doesn't involve a vacuum cleaner, so the baddie's one up on Marko.