Forty years ago this month - January 1974.

All lovers of high culture will be delighted to know this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the most important movie in cinema history.

That's right! It was indeed four decades ago the world saw the original release of that hard-hitting box office smash The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. How we thrilled as Dan Haggerty grew his beard, stared at logs and, erm, breathed in and out and things.

But will our favourite Marvel heroes of forty years ago be feeling a little grizzly?

Or will they instead be celebrating a short-lived paws in their battle against evil?

The Vulture's still back - and he's still out to get Mary Jane for seeing him commit a murder.

Or is he?

I could be wrong but I think this tale was the first Whodunit The Amazing Spider-Man comic ever attempted.

It certainly wasn't the last. After this, there seemed to be a spell when Peter Parker's alter-ego couldn't stop acting like an adolescent Columbo.

It's Halloween, and the Collector's back.

To be honest, he's not my favourite villain. He's too badly dressed, ugly and annoying for that.

I'm pretty sure that, in this tale, he tries to defeat the world's mightiest super-team by firing bats at them.

You see? That's not my idea of a classy villain.

Cap finds himself up against the only super-criminal ever to have been named after a social networking site.

Conan's got a stabbing pain in the temple again.

Putting my critic's head on, I'd say there's far too much going on on this cover. Exactly what are we supposed to be focusing on?

Still, it's always nice to see Captain Marvel back.

Darkoth the death demon shows up from the very bowels of hell.

It's another belter as the Rhino and Abomination take over Gamma Base - and only the Hulk can stop them.

But will he actually need to?

Thor's still battling against those aliens armed with giant vacuum cleaners.

And will wonders never cease? He's actually managing not to be defeatist on the cover of his own comic!

Who sez komics arnt edyoucayshonal?

Reader, can YOU guess in what way this
book broadened my education, before I reveal
the answer, in this very post?

Despite my ellokwence and dickshun, I must admit to having a mixed view of the whole concept of education.

On the one hand, going to school every day enabled me to encounter the concept of parquet flooring. A concept I don't think I've ever encountered anywhere else in my entire life.

But the bad news is I'm totally convinced that, when it comes to book stuff, I can't remember a single thing I was taught in secondary school.

Seriously.

I mean, I remember such phrases as, "differential equations," "Boyle's Law," and "Sines and Cosines," but, to this day, I remain totally ignorant as to what any of them actually are.

On the other hand, I can remember every single thing I was ever taught in primary school.

Sadly, I've since come to realise that not one thing I was taught in primary school was actually true. Ring a Ring 'o Roses isn't about the Black Death, There aren't seven colours in a rainbow. Florence Nightingale didn't save zillions of lives in the Crimea. It wasn't possible to hang a gold necklace from a tree in the Middle Ages and return a year later to find it still there, thanks to the astonishing honesty of people in those days. Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone. Different parts of your tongue don't detect different tastes. Blood isn't blue until exposed to air. No one thought the world was flat before Columbus. It is legal to start a sentence with, "And."

And, despite being forced to sing it every day in assembly, for what felt like years, I now have reason to believe we don't all live in a yellow submarine.

Fortunately none of this mattered.

Because, if the education system couldn't be relied on to get any thinks into my head, at least I had comics to do it for me.

As I mentioned the other day, I first learned the phrase, "Bury the hatchet," from The Amazing Spider-Man.

Not only that but I also learned the phrase, "cold feet," from it, thanks to Spidey's first encounter with the Sinister Six.

And that title wasn't alone in its educational prowess. Over the years, my vocabulary was widened so much by comics, I could no longer get it through the door.

I learned the phrase, "muscle bound," from an early issue of the Hulk.

I learnt the word, "cybernetic," from Ant-Man.

I learned the word, "Abomination," from the Hulk - and, "transmogrification," from Stan Lee's Bring On The Bad Guys. Sadly, the Hulk singularly failed to learn that lesson and resolutely insisted on calling the character in question, "Big ears," from start to finish.

From Thor, I learned the word, "Mjolnir," though not how to pronounce it.

From Dr Strange, I learned the world, "hoary."

Thor taught me, "knave," and, "churl."

Tony Stark taught me, "top hat transistor," though I'm not sure if top hat transistors ever really existed or if they were just a figment of Stan Lee and Don Heck's imaginations.

The X-Men taught me, "mutant," and, "magneto."

And from the redoubtable General Thunderbolt Ross, I learned two words no man should ever be without; "panty-waister," and, "milksop."

All in all, thanks to comics, I learned more words than a sane man would ever think existed.

Granted, there is one catch in all this.

And that's that I can't think of one occasion in my life when I've ever had reason to use a single word I learned from a comic. Who would have thought, "frug," would never have a practical use in life?

But I'm an optimistic man. And so, I feel confident that, one day, I shall indeed encounter the perfect time to call someone a, "Knavish panty-waister."

Anyway, that's my heart-warming experience. If you ever learned any words or phrases from comics, you're free to say so below.

If you haven't learned anything at all from comics, you're also free to say so below. This is, after all, the blog that celebrates knowledge and ignorance as though they were different but equal brothers.

Fifty years ago today - January 1964.

Scottish pop-folk warbler Barbara Dickson once sang, "January, February, don't you come around." But every year for the thirty four years since she first sang those words, those months have indeed ignored her demands and returned.

Foolish months! Do they not know that Barbara Dickson will not be thwarted!

But will our favourite Marvel heroes of fifty years ago find themselves thwarted in their battles against evil?

Or with they instead find themselves rising in triumph, as Barbara's near-namesake Reginald Dixon so often did as he rose from beneath the floor of Blackpool Tower Ballroom each night whilst banging away on his Wurlitzer?

To be honest, I don't know.

It's one of my early Spidey faves, as everyone's favourite wall-crawler finds himself up against the Living Brain - and then acts like a complete jerk by wrecking the Human Torch's party.

It's all good fun stuff but I'm not sure how this issue counts as a tribute to teenagers, as every teenager in it behaves like a total idiot from start to finish.

This was the story that first introduced me to the phrase, "Bury the hatchet." As always, I owe my current staggering levels of literacy to comics.

It has to be the most easily riled partnership in history. Only one issue after he left the Avengers, the Hulk's back - and he's got the Sub-Mariner in tow.

Meanwhile, it's a reappearance no one was praying for, as the Mole Man makes one of his bafflingly numerous returns.

Tyrannus! Why was it never Tyrannus the FF came up against? At least he had a bit of class. At least he had Mogol, who could give The Thing a bit of a fight.

Then again, Reginald Dixon, he lived underground, under the Tower Ballroom floorboards. They could have tried fighting Reginald Dixon.

Mr Hyde's still up to no good and, for once, Thor's not declaring the battle to be hopeless before it's even begun.

Is that the Puppet Master I spy in the background? I hope so. I always had a soft spot for him.

It's another of my mid-1960s faves, as the Angel turns evil and somehow manages to defeat Iron Man who can also fly, has a zillion and one other powers and is in a suit of armour!

I remember this issue having a great sequence where Steve Ditko gives us a demonstration of how Tony Stark puts that armour on. That may not sound very thrilling but, trust me, at the time I was mightily impressed.

Giant-Man's still having ridiculous amounts of trouble with the Human Top and it's still one of my favourite tales from the era.

A wiser man than me might spot that Giant-Man's repeated and futile struggle to grab hold of the Human Top symbolises Henry Pym's doomed attempts to hold onto his own sanity.

I've never read this one. In fact, I don't think I've ever read any story where the Blob actually features as a villain, and so have no idea how much of a menace he actually is.

Comic book free gifts I have loved.

As we all know, there are only three things that matter in life to the true intellectual. They are; super-powers, pretty pictures and brand new toys.

How fortunate then that comics were invented. For, in the dim days of my youth, they could provide a man with all three.

Granted, the toys you sometimes got for free with British comics weren't necessarily top of the range. There were no free Scalextrices or Meccano sets to be had. No Action Men, nor Gerry Anderson related Dinky toys. But when you're a child and Christmas only comes once a year, who can be fussy?

I seem to recall that British comic publishers seemed to have an unlimited supply of what they claimed were, "boomerangs," but were in fact red plastic rings with three flat wide spokes that connected with each other in the centre.

Did they ever come back when thrown?

Not that I can remember.

But, clearly, somewhere in Slough there must have been a warehouse packed solid with the things, just ready for when the next comic publisher required half a million of 'em to give away. I like to feel that that warehouse is still there and that, like King Arthur, it shall return when the nation is in most need of it.

I also once got a plastic, rubber-band powered, pistol that fired paper pellets. From where I got it, I sadly no  longer recall.

I'm pretty sure I got a miniature set of playing cards from Donald and Micky comic.

But the first gift I remember getting from a Marvel mag was the legendary Spider-Man mask from Spider-Man Comics Weekly, Long-standing readers'll know that receiving it was the most soul-crushing moment of my entire life, as the mask that I'd expected to confer mystery and awesomeness upon me turned out to bear a remarkable resemblance to a red paper bag with eye holes cut into it. How could I have confronted the Vulture dressed like that? He'd have merely laughed at me.

Marvel UK's Star Wars comic was far more impressive. In its early days, I got a free cardboard cut-out-and-assemble Tie Fighter from it - and an X-Wing fighter. Sadly, Marvel UK drew the line at a replica of the Death Star.

I would like to claim that the days of me being impressed by free gifts are over but I must confess that, even in adulthood, I once bought one issue of a short-lived British Marvel reprint title, featuring Iron Man and the Fantastic Four, purely because it had a lollipop sellotaped to the front of it.

But the truth is that my most fondly remembered free gift from a comic was an iron-on transfer of Tutankhamun's death mask that came in some British comic in the early 1970s. Possibly it was in Whizzer and Chips. Possibly it was in Whizzer and Cheops. Possibly it wasn't. Either way, I assume it was included in order to cash in on the Tutankhamunmania that was then sweeping the land, as his possessions were on show in some museum or other in London at the time.

And I shall never forget the time I got a cut-out-and-assemble television studio from Look-In magazine. Granted, it wasn't life-size but, an entire TV studio? Now there was a magazine that knew how to do free gifts.

But I couldn't do such a post as this without getting into the spirit of things. And so, Reader, exclusively with this blog today, you'll find a free gift attached to this very post, in the form of a cut-out-and-keep reproduction of the front cover of Marve UK's Star Wars #1 from 1978. You can then mount it on a cardboard backing, to place it upright on your bedside table. From now on, you shall begin every day by waking to the sight of Luke Skywalker waving his light sabre at you. All you have to do is snip it out of your computer screen, with a pair of scissors (not supplied) and it's yours.

This week, I have mostly been reading...

As you no doubt know, this blog ploughs through millions of comics every day in order to bring you opinions so powerful they could rock the world. Why, grown men themselves have been known to hide in cupboards to avoid the power of my fulminations.

But the truth is that even I don't always have strong enough feelings about a comic to bother reviewing it in full. Therefore, this is a selection of what I've been looking at lately that I can't bring myself to give a full write-up to.

The Avengers have their second outing and find themselves up against the Space Phantom who, for years, I always got mixed up with the Space Parasite.

Needless to say, in this tale, everyone gets everyone mixed up with the Space Phantom and by the end of it all, the Hulk's quit and the newly formed group are already a man down.

Just to make things worse for our heroes, not only are they a man short but the very next issue, they have to fight both him and the Sub-Mariner.

Bah! Who needs that pesky Hulk anyway? Thanks to the maturity levels that only Namor can supply, the Avengers return to full strength with the return of Captain America.

Batman has  his greatest failure!

Or perhaps he doesn't, as he encounters murder on a film set.

This is actually one of my favourite Batman tales from the era but I don't have anything to say about it that I haven't said about other Batman tales in other posts, therefore I shall not review it but merely express my liking for it.

Captain Marvel goes all cosmic and has his head redrawn by John Romita.

To be honest I've never been totally sure what Cosmic Awareness is but it's all good mythic stuff as Jim Starlin's Cosmic Cube saga rumbles on and we get some back-story for the solar system.

Jim Starlin's long-gone but Mar-Vell's Cosmic Awareness comes in handy as he uses it to beat the Super-Adaptoid and bring Rick Jones permanently back to our world.

Tragically, this means we shall have to endure more of Rick's singing career which mostly seems to consist of him declaring himself not to be John Denver.

I can confirm that I too am not John Denver.

Ka-Zar finds himself in a Savage Land re-enactment of Moby Dick as he helps a vengeance-seeking wally try to kill a giant river monster.

The story's concept might be pretty clichéd but it's beautifully drawn by Alfredo Alcala.

It's the Mighty World of Marvel but it might as well be called Daredevil Annual 1979, as our red clad hero finds himself in two tales.

The first is a very long but uninvolving team-up with the Black Panther. The second is shorter and stronger as the man without fear finds himself on a train, up against the Beetle and the Gladiator.

Forty years ago this month - December 1973.

December 1973. It was the month when the two greatest Christmas songs of all time - Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody and Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday were released. How we watched with bated breath as they battled it out for chart supremacy.

But who was gaining supremacy in the battle between our heroes and their enemies as that year drew to a close?

Only a ride in Steve's magic sleigh ride to the past can tell us.

And it's about to do it  right now.

No one else likes this story.

I love it.

We get the senses-shattering return of the Vulture, intent on snuffing out Mary Jane before she can dob him in to the cops about a murder he's committed.

Or do we?

The Evil Eye saga hits its climax, as the Avengers and Defenders confront Loki and Dormammu.

To be honest it's a story I know nothing of but Cap looks strangely unbothered about the prospect of being both sautéed and broiled at the same time.

Conan's in his traditional spot of bother.

Judging by the absence of the obligatory cowering blonde from the cover, I assume it must have been her month off. Even cowering blondes have to take a break sometimes. All that crawling around on your hands and knees, and flinging your hand in front of your face, it can be a very tiring profession.

Daredevil and the Black Widow find themselves up against the menace of Terrex, who is presumably no relation to Terrax.

Is this the one where Reed Richards does whatever it is to his son that Fantastic Four fans have been complaining about ever since?

It's another classic, as the Hulk finds himself up against an island full of monsters.

I got this cover from The Grand Comics Database. Some naughty soul seems to have removed Betty Ross's clothes before posting it on there.

At last Iron Man has the sense to do what I'd do if I had a suit of armour. He goes on a murderous rampage.

Is this the one where Thor and his mates come up across a giant planet populated by giant people with a giant hoover?

I was never sure about this era of Thor. He and his sidekicks seemed to spend all their time on quests into deep space when they should have been on Earth bashing up Mr Hyde and the Cobra.

Hooray! Not only is it an Original X-Men issue I had when I was a youth but it's an X-Men issue I actually liked, as our heroes find themselves up against Factor Three.

Sadly, I seem to remember the next issue being a return to the same old half-baked pants we usually got from the Original X-Men.

Fifty years ago today - December 1963.

Hooray! It's December - the only month of the year that rhymes with, "Dismember."

But will our favourite Marvel heroes of fifty years ago be taking their foes apart - or merely falling to pieces under the pressure?

Only a journey in Steve's wibbly wobbly time machine can tell us.

The Hate-Monger makes his aggro-packed debut.

But what oh what can his senses-shattering secret be?

Click here to find out. But be warned, your sanity might not be able to take it.

Mr Hyde makes his first appearance and it's another of those weirdly defeatist covers that Thor specialised in.

Someone call the nurses. The Vulture's escaped from the retirement home again.

By the looks of it, Marvel cunningly use the fact that Spider-Man's not in the tale to make you think Spider-Man's in the tale. That Stan Lee was a marketing genius.

As for the Sandman; if you're made of sand, is it really a good idea to take on someone whose power is flame?

Thanks to Steve Ditko, Iron Man gets a new costume and unveils possibly the least likely piece of technology in the history of comics, as he takes on the power of Mr Doll.

I had a reprint of this, in an Alan Class comic, when I was a kid. I always had a soft spot for it, even though poor old Hank Pym comes across as being completely useless in it. Frankly, the sight of him being pitied by the Wasp every step of the way - it's not a dignified thing.