November 30th, 1974 - Marvel UK, 50 years ago this week.

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

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I think we all dig looking into our ancestry but, this week in 1974, we were literally digging up our ancestry when a female skeleton from the hominid species Australopithecus Afarensis was uncovered in the Awash Valley, Ethiopia and subsequently named Lucy.

How old was she?

Only 3.2 million years.

And, you know what? That's even older than the comics I'm about to discuss.

Gil Kane gives us yet another chance to look up people's nostrils, thanks to the cover for an issue in which Spider-Man must prevent the Human Torch from killing the Lizard before our hero can turn him back into good old Curt Connors.

Iron Man, meanwhile, must tackle the returning Hawkeye and Black Widow.

That may not be as easy as it sounds, because the Widow now has a fancy-pants costume and something approximating super-powers, thanks to her new outfit's ability to stick to walls and fire string and stings from it.

Tony Stark, meanwhile, is still mithering about his inability to tell Pepper his true feelings for her.

In New York, Thor, Sif and Balder defeat Magnir and Brona while, in Asgard, Odin must face the third and mightiest of those villains, the foul Forsung.

It's a veritable battle with time when Shang-Chi finds himself trapped in a giant hour-glass filled with spikes.

That won't hold him for long but things get far worse than that when the blundering oaf manages to kill his own girlfriend Sandra Chen, having been fooled into thinking she's the living embodiment of death.

The new Black Knight, meanwhile, is trying to recruit the Avengers to help liberate his castle from the clutches of Magneto.

But, first, he has to get them to stop attacking him!

And Dr Strange is trying to rescue Clea and Victoria Bentley from Dormammu in what I suspect to be Gene Colan's first work on the strip.

Poor old Gwen Stacy. First the Green Goblin wants to kill her and, now, so does Dracula.

But I jest. She is, of course, not Gwen Stacy.

Having said that, I don't have a clue who she is.

By the looks of it, though, she won't be around for long.

When it comes to werewolves by night, I do believe Andrea Timly's captured Jack Russell, in a bid to locate The Darkhold.

And Frankenstein's Monster expresses his frustration towards his creator, by killing the scientist and his wife!

After his recent misdemeanours, Taylor's put on trial by Dr Zaius.

And, despite the jury being made up of apes, it's very much a court of the kangaroo variety.

Thanks to that sentence, I now have the word "boomerang-utan" stuck in my head but have no idea how to use it in an actual functioning sentence.

In Ka-Zar's strip, not only has the Petrified Man become Garokk the Sun God, he's also gone insane and homicidal.

Fortunately, Ka-Zar's around to fling him into his own pool of immortality and kill him.

While, on Mars, Gullivar Jones is left to ask What Price Victory?

It took forever to happen but happen it finally has, as the Hulk gets to meet the diabolical Dr Doom when the Latverian tyrant decides Bruce Banner's just the kind of bomb scientist he needs, and the Hulk's just the kind of bomb delivery system he wants.

Meanwhile, the world thinks the brute is dead, thanks to Doom having blown up a Hulk-Bot in full view of everyone.

A terrifying new villain enters the life of Daredevil when the Leap-Frog makes his bouncy debut. How can even the man without fear hope to triumph when confronted by a man wearing flippers?

Even more significantly, Matt Murdock decides to tell Foggy and Karen that, despite what Spider-Man might think, he isn't Daredevil.

And that his never-before-mentioned twin brother is!

Yes, celebrate, humanity. Mike Murdock is about to enter the building.

Meanwhile, the Thing is in sensational solo action when he thinks the Silver Surfer's getting a bit too friendly with Alicia, and decides the solution to that problem is a knuckle sandwich.

That turns out not to be the solution to the problem.