Happy 40th birthday to The Titans.

Forty years ago this week, the world of comics may not have been turned upside down but it was at least turned over onto its side and left lying there for over a year, as Marvel UK launched a comic like no other.

That comic was The Titans and it didn't just throw the rule book in the bin, it then jumped up and down on that bin, until that bin was nothing more than a crumpled pile of scrap metal, left wondering just what the hell had hit it.

Why? Because, in a moment of mad genius, Marvel UK had decided it'd be a great idea to print a comic sideways.

Why they decided to do this, I have no idea. Perhaps whoever was in charge was in the habit of tipping their TV over while watching it, or perhaps they'd had a lifelong dream of being buried vertically.

If one put no thought into it at all, the advantages of the policy were clear to see. Obviously, by adopting the format and therefore printing two pages side by side on each sheet, it meant they could publish twice as much material as before, at no greater expense.

But it also meant it was guaranteed to run out of reprint material twice as fast as a normal mag.

Considering the problems they'd had with Planet of the Apes running out of reprint material, and that their Super-Heroes title was already reduced to giving us Ant-Man and the Cat in its search for stories, it does seem amazing that this didn't occur to them.

Of course, none of that mattered at all to an eleven year old reader. To an eleven year old, all that mattered was that we suddenly got twice as much entertainment on a Saturday as we could have hoped for.

Bearing in mind that Saturday was a day notorious for giving us nothing to watch on TV until Mick McManus showed up at teatime to forearm smash people in the face, this was a development that could only be welcomed.

Its voracious nature also meant that we got to read the adventures of Marvel's less commercially viable stars like Nick Fury, the Sub-Mariner and the Inhumans.

Unlike The Super-Heroes, The Avengers, Dracula Lives and Savage Sword of Conan, I managed to read the first issue. Not only that but I was grabbed by it at once.

Maybe there was something wrong with me but I actually preferred the smaller artwork it presented us with. I also appreciated the chance to discover the adventures of characters who wouldn't have been able to find house space in comics that could afford to be more choosy about their material. And because of all this, from the moment I first saw it, I had no doubt at all that truly this was a comic that, like Janus the Nega-Man, was destined for greatness.

Well, as it turned out, it wasn't. It lasted barely more than a year before it merged with Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes, which had by then also adopted the sideways format.

For me, its highlights were it introducing me to Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Jim Steranko's Captain America, not to mention giving us the last couple of years of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four and also bringing us the conclusion of the Avengers' Kree/Skrull War, a saga that was born in the Avengers' own mag, spent its middle age in the Mighty World of Marvel and finally claimed its death bed in The Titans. You have to hand it to Marvel UK, they could at times be chaotic but they never gave you the chance to get complacent.

So, in the end, The Titans didn't revolutionise comics or even moderately change them but it was, in its time, possibly my favourite Marvel mag, precisely because of the things that wiser men than me might claim were its failings.

Horizontal heroics from a long-gone landscape. The Titans #1.

Has there ever been a greater comic book cover than that of Marvel UK's The Titans #1? What kind of comics fan could resist the sight of all those heroes rushing out of the page at him?

Of course, the other thing that leapt out at you when you first saw The Titans was that it was printed the wrong way up. Surely such a thing was madness but it was also genius, allowing twice as much content at no extra cost.

Admittedly, not all those heroes on the cover could exactly be called easily recognisable. Just who is, for instance, that blue man with the pointy ears behind Nick Fury?

But, if the cover wasn't packed entirely with what you could call Marvel "A" Listers, it was at least a reflection of the mag's not-always Top Line content as the issue kicked off with the Inhumans in a tale written as well as drawn by Jack Kirby, which means the dialogue's often made up of people just describing what's happening and we get a silly plot by Maximus the Mad to start a war between the Inhumans and humans by making the former think the Fantastic Four are firing missiles at them. The Inhuman Royal Family, having seemingly had lobotomies, all fall for this cunning ruse and, within mere pages, Black Bolt's all ready to declare war.

If the Inhumans are ready to launch into conflict, the next story starts in the thick of one as we get Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's 1960s retelling of Captain America's origin. At just ten pages, it can only be seen as a master class in compression - although it does bring home Captain America's irresponsibility in making a young boy his accomplice on deadly missions and it does beg the question as to why Captain America - who was presumably a captain - spent most of the war pretending to be a private instead of just being Captain America.

From one World War Two veteran to another as we're then given the first half of Nick Fury's first-ever adventure as Agent of SHIELD. It's not exactly a secret that I'm somewhat allergic to both Nick Fury and SHIELD but the story does at least feature a flying car, so it has something to appeal to me.

Next we get the issue's only real clunker as Stan Lee and Gene Colan give us the start of a Sub-Mariner epic in which Namor returns to Atlantis only to discover Warlord Krang has claimed the throne of Atlantis in his absence. It'd be easy to say one's outraged by this villainous behaviour but the truth is Namor acts like such a complete jerk in virtually every panel that when Krang has him flung into a cage to rot, you're hoping he spends the rest of eternity there. Sadly, Lady Dorma - who betrayed Namor to Krang in an attempt to win Namor's heart - then helps him to escape in order to try and win his heart. Those Stan Lee scripted women, eh?

Captain Marvel too finds himself threatened by a menace that arrives from underwater as he faces the Metazoid, a Soviet dissident who, exposed to experimental rays, has become a strange inhuman creature. The Metazoid's been told by his masters that if he kidnaps Mar-Vell's alter-ego - rocket scientist Walt Lawson - they'll restore him to normal. The tale's dominated by the Metazoid's struggles with his conscience and endless philosophising as he tries to work out whether he can justify kidnapping a man to return himself to normal. Surprisingly the haunted nature of the Metazoid makes the Captain Marvel tale the best story in the issue, marred only by the fact that some of the pages are printed out of order. Was this a consequence of the printers struggling to make sense of the new format or was it just one of those things that happens?

Throw in a John Buscema poster featuring a whole host of Marvel super-doers, and a plug for that year's Marvel annuals and there you have it; as far as I know, Britain's - and possibly the world's - first ever landscape format comic. I can't deny it, the format and the five stories per issue always made The Titans feel like something special to me. There was also something that appealed about the unpredictability of just what strips were going to be in it that week.

Have there been any comics since The Titans and Super Spider-Man that were printed in landscape format? It's a shame if there haven't because it was an ingenious idea and, when my destiny's finally fulfilled and I hold ownership of the American comic book industry in my talons, then the world had better beware, for I shall make sure the landscape format returns to once more bamboozle printers and newsagents alike.

The Titans Annual 1977. A sideways look at a non-sideways book.

According to that infallible source of information we call Mr Google, The Titans was an unpopular comic unloved by readers because it shrank artwork to the size of a postage stamp, and feared by newsagents because it'd flop around hopelessly when stacked vertically. This is odd as I have nothing but happy memories of it.

For those not in the know, in 1975, someone at Marvel UK had the type of stroke of genius that leads to the invention of Post-It notes and decided to launch a comic that was printed horizontally rather than vertically. Because of the larger paper sizes used in British comics, this meant two pages of artwork could be printed on every physical page of comic, meaning that twice as much story could be crammed into each issue.

Granted, at a time when Marvel's weekly reprints were fast catching up on the US originals, printing twice as much material every week probably wasn't the wisest of moves but like I cared. I was getting twice as much super-hero action every Saturday. That's all that mattered to me.

It differed in one other way too. While the other Marvel UK's had a regular roster of strips, the Titans line-up changed on a regular basis, mostly because it concentrated on characters who'd often struggled to hold down their own title Stateside. And so, while the other UK mags gave us big-hitters like the Hulk, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and the Avengers, in The Titans we found the likes of the Inhumans, Agent of SHIELD and Captain Marvel.

1977's Titans annual however ignored all that and was printed vertically. It kicks off with a story in which the Sub-Mariner comes up against a slime monster from space. Apparently, it was first conceived as the second part of an Aquaman story but, when it was never used, Steve Skeates dusted it down and rewrote it as a Sub-Mariner tale. This does explain something that always baffled me as a kid and that was why the Sub-Mariner in this tale seems noticeably less powerful than he normally is.

Next we get the comic book equivalent of a clip show, as Captain America spends twenty pages looking back on his life and career, trying to decide if he should remain as Captain America. Rather surprisingly, at the tale's conclusion, he decides he shouldn't. Despite being one long string of flashbacks, Sal Buscema and Steve Englehart give us what has to be viewed as the best tale in the book.

I think I've mentioned before that I was never that fussy as a child. The only 1960s Marvel Comics I never liked were ones starring Nick Fury, and the Original X-Men. It's a bit of a shame then that, from this point on, the annual becomes an Original X-Men smorgasbord; first with a Werner Roth drawn look at the powers and prowess of Cyclops and then, with a Dashing Don Heck story wherein they come up against Frankenstein's Monster who turns out to be a robot from outer space. Frankly, it's a terrible tale. All the more so since Prof X knows all along the monster can be defeated by Iceman but refuses to let Iceman use his powers on it until the allotted twenty pages are up. Re-reading this juvenile run-around reminds me all over again of why I hated the 1960s X-Men.

Next it's back to Werner Roth for a look at the powers and prowess of Marvel Girl . Despite being written by Linda Fite, who I assume to be a woman, it seems Marvel Girl's powers consist mostly of picking apples, peeling apples, doing housework and picking up scissors. She then reveals that her greatest power of all is the power to get men leching after her in the street. Who says the 1960s were a different age?

We finish off with another Captain America tale. Why the Captain gets two stories when a whole bunch of characters who featured in the weekly comics are missing is anyone's guess. Bearing in mind the short-lived nature of many of The Titans' strips, maybe there were simply more unused Captain American back issues available but it's an odd tale, drawn by Frank Robbins, who seems to loom large in this blog. Cap Am's walking past an airport when, as you do, he decides to randomly climb aboard a plane. As luck would have it, it's full of criminals led by the notorious Dr Faustus. After messing about for a bit, Cap sorts it all out by calling the police and letting them deal with the bad guys. In terms of super-heroics, that might not be the most dynamic thing you've ever seen from a Marvel character but it probably is the most sensible. I like to think Cap was hiding in the toilets while the police were sorting things out.

In retrospect, it's an oddly disappointing annual, bearing little relation to the comic that spawned it and certainly isn't up to the standards of the other Marvel UK Annuals that came out that year. But so what? I don't care. It appeared in my life on Christmas Day and you're never going to feel ill-disposed towards anything that did that.