October 27th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

Hooray! I'm posting this a day early - because, thanks to that impertinent interloper the world knows as, "Real Life," I may not be available to post it tomorrow, and the automatic post scheduler on this site never seems to do what it's told to.

Still, that means we get a mighty handful of Marvel awesomeness even earlier than expected, and who could complain about that?

The enemies of our favourite Marvel heroes could. That's who.

That's because it means they're going to get punched in the face even sooner than they could ever have dreamt possible.

It's the first issue of Captain Britain that I ever read!

As I've said elsewhere, I wasn't overly impressed by the star of the show but I did at least like the way he smelled.

I have always wondered though just why Captain Britain's staff had the French Tricolour on it. Clearly he was a very confused nationalist.

I'm assuming the Fantastic Four tale is the one where the Thing turns bad, yet again, and has a punch-up with the Hulk. It's odd but I have no memory at all of ever having read that tale at the time. Given its epoch-making nature, it does seem odd that I'd totally forget ever having encountered it.

It's a miracle! I think I know what the Ka-Zar story is and even believe I have a copy of it lying around somewhere!

I'll have to make the effort to review it in the not-too-distant future, as, if it's the one I think it is, it has some nice artwork, and people who have stripes like those of  zebras.

I detect the arrival of the world's greatest poetry-spouting triceratops. And it's not every issue you can say that about.

The Scorpion returns for the first time since the days of Ditko.

Considering how epic his first appearance was, it seems strange that he was used so sparingly in the strip from that point on.

Isn't this the one where the prison guards let him have his costume back, in an attempt to cheer him up? What a fantastic prison. With penal staff of that quality, it's hard to see why 1970s New York had such a crime problem.

I love this story. That naughty rapscallion Ares tries to stir up a war on Earth, we get the return of Hercules, the return of Hawkeye and the chance to see just how much Barry Smith's style has changed since his previous stint on the strip way back in Adamantium's origin tale.

I am alarmed by the title of that Captain America tale though. Does it mean he's going to be going on about Bucky again?

2000 AD - September 1978.

It's nearly November.

That can only mean it's time to look at what the galaxy's greatest comic was up to in September.

No one can accuse this blog of not being topical.

It's currently 2016. The September in question is in 1978.

No one can accuse this blog of not being topical.

For me, the biggest news from September 1978's issues is that, in Prog 81, the Tharg's Future Shock story is - What Hit Tunguska? I'm wondering if this was the first time I ever heard about that mysterious incident which has so intrigued the world for over a century.

That was in 1908. No one can accuse this blog of not being topical.

To be honest, other than that, I don't have a lot to say about this month's issues. It's nice to see Robo-Hunter on the front cover. Could this strip - and not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - have been the true inspiration for Blade Runner?

Well, probably not but I'm still going to draw the parallel anyway, if only to push up the word count of this post.

It's interesting to see Dan Dare being called, "The Guardian of the Galaxy," on his cover. Marvel must have been contacting their lawyers even as that issue hit the newsstands.

And it's nice to see Ant Wars on a cover, given that I've always had a penchant for films about giant insects on the rampage.

October 20th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

It would appear, from scouring the pages of Twitter, that the headliners for next year's Glastonbury Festival have just been announced.

As a clapped-out old has-been, I would of course declare them to be nothing compared to the headliners of the 1976 festival - except there wasn't a 1976 Glastonbury Festival.

Clearly, there was presumed to be no demand for it, as all true culture lovers were too busy reading the output of our favourite comic company.

Britain's greatest ever super-hero gets his second ever outing.

Not that the creative team in America are going for every British cliché available but, after encountering Merlin and Stonehenge in his first appearance, he now comes up against a knight in shining armour. Next he'll be driving to fights, in a double decker bus and setting up base in a red phone box.

After just over two years, I've finally developed the wisdom to take Colin Jones' advice and remembered to look at Hunter's Planet of the Apes Archive before doing one of these posts.

I can thus tell you that this issue centres on a story that allegedly bridges the gap between Conquest and Battle. It all seems to be highly violent and a warning to us all of the dangers of inter-species intolerance.

Sweet Christmas! It's a ground-breaking day for Marvel UK, as Luke Cage gets his own strip in their flagship title!

The only time I remember him appearing in Marvel UK before this was when he tackled Spider-Man, straight after the death of Gwen Stacy.

As for his own strip, I didn't mind it but it never particularly gripped me. I suspect that his foes were generally not of a standard to fully satisfy me.

Speaking of foes who aren't of a standard to fully satisfy me, Spidey's still in France and still battling the mind-boggling power of the Cyclone, possibly the only super-villain ever to have been defeated by a fan.

I take it this issue features the Silver Surfer vs Durok the Demolisher. I do believe I've previously mentioned my appreciation of Durok. You can't help but admire a villain who prefers to do his fighting in silence.

From out of the blue, Golden Age heroes burst out of the dimmest recesses of Rick Jones' psyche.

And, from out of the blue, the Avengers appear in the pages of The Titans, after several months in Mighty World of Marvel. They just don't seem to be able to make up their minds as to which comic they should be appearing in.

I do remember being highly disappointed at the time that Neal Adams didn't get to finish the story he'd done so much to define, even if we did get to see more old-time heroes than you could shake a stick at.

I am interested in Captain America being in deadly battle with himself. I'm trying to recall just which tale that could have been.

Forty years ago today - October 1976.

It's been a mad time, of late, for us all, with evil clowns on the loose and gorillas escaping from their enclosures.

There's only thing for it. I'm going to have to take refuge by leaping into the Time Vortex and fleeing to the safety of 1976.

But, even there, it's not that safe - because it's the senses-shattering debut of Chicken Man or whatever he's called, as we get a tale of Voodoo that I believe restores Wonder Man to the pages of the Avengers and leads to all manner of internal and external conflict for the Vision.

Hooray! I had this one - and the next three issues!

It's the tale that sets up the Conan/Red Sonja/Bêlit punch-up/team-up/mash-up that sets up the first epic meeting of Conan and King Kull.

I'm not totally sure what happens in this story but it looks like it might be curtains for Cap.

Is my memory betraying me or was Death's Head's horse just a normal horse painted to look like a skeleton? If so, exactly how could that fool anyone who was standing within a hundred feet of it?

I had this one too - and the next three issues. Galactus threatens Counter-Earth and we get the battle we all wanted to see, between him and the High Evolutionary.

In retrospect, it's clear that it's basically a retread of the original Galactus Trilogy, with the High Evolutionary standing in for the Surfer, and the Planet Poppup  substituted for the Ultimate Nullifier.

I have no memory of this tale at all but is that a Herb Trimpe cover? And does this mean he also drew the interior?

As I may have mentioned before, I always had a soft spot for the Controller because he seemed a suitably nasty piece of work.

Didn't he gain the strength of everyone he took control of? Does that mean that, if he took control of a billion billion beings, he'd be able to fight Mangog? Then again, what if he took control of Mangog and another billion billion beings? He'd be able to beat anybody.

I remember loving this story when I was a youth, mostly because it was the first chance I had to get a substantial exposure to Nightcrawler who I'd previously only known from his appearance in X-Men #100.

Hooray! I've always liked Ulik. I do wish he'd been allowed to win from time to time. It would have made him seem far more effective as a villain and therefore more of an actual threat. Apart from their first meeting, Thor always seemed to dispose of him with little difficulty.

It's an epoch-making issue, as the Phoenix makes her debut, and things will never be the same again. It's a tale that reminds me of why I loved the Dave Cockrum era so much.

October 13th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

I must announce I've scoured the internet, with a fine-toothed comb and can find no signs of anything interesting having happened anywhere in the world on October 13th, 1976.

Fortunately, we didn't need anything to happen in the real world.

That's because we were still reeling from the events that had unfolded in the world of Marvel UK in the preceding few days.

And this is why! It's the comic that's going to change all our lives forever!

Britain's first and greatest super-hero - if you ignore all those earlier ones like The Spider and The Steel Claw - makes his pole-swinging debut!

He also gives us a free gift while he's at it!

Tragically, I never had that free gift because I never had issue #1 but the strip was written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Herb Trimpe, so, even with my absence, how could it not be a success that was guaranteed to run and run?

Will man and ape ever learn to live together in peace and harmony?

Judging by the cover, I'm beginning to suspect they may not.

I am always impressed by how easy characters in these comics find it to beat up gorillas. I'd like to see the writers and artists of the strips try to beat up a gorilla and see just how far they get with it.

The Gremlin's up to no good at all.

I believe this is the tale where various members of the Hulkbusters team decide to invade the Gremlin's castle.

Is it to rescue Glenn Talbot from the Russians?

Does it turn out he's lost his memory?

Doesn't the Hulk then have to enter his brain and sort him out with a peculiarly muscular brand of psychiatry?

Forget Captain Britain. Not to be outdone by its troublesome neighbour to the north, France gets its very own nationalistic super-doer as the Cyclone makes his first appearance. Tragically, he didn't hang around for as long as the good Captain did.

But forget Britain and France's super-doers. We don't need them for excitement - because we've got the Negative Zone's battlingest battler, as Annihilus returns and we soon get things heading towards that planet again. The one that destroys everything that enters its atmosphere.

Given that the Negative Zone appears to be a whole universe in its own right, you'd think it'd be fairly easy to stay away from that planet but, somehow, no FF visit to the Negative Zone ever seemed to happen without it looming into view.

Captain Britain!

This week in 1976 was a good week for all rampant nationalists, as Marvel UK gave us their first ever super-hero.

Admittedly, he wasn't really their first ever super-hero because they'd already given us the epic legend that was Apeslayer but this one was at least their first ever British super-hero.

I'd like to claim I was blown away by issue #1 of this mag but I never saw it. I don't think I got hold of a copy of the title until it hit its third issue.

What I recall of that comic was that it was mostly in colour, with one page generously left in monochrome so we could colour it in ourselves.

The other thing that most struck me was its rather magnificent smell which was like that of no other comic I'd ever owned. When it came to scents, it was somewhat in the marker pen envelope and was therefore a good thing. Frankly, I could have sat there inhaling its fumes forever.

In all honestly, apart from the smell, the comic never particularly grabbed me. Captain Britain and his cast owed far too much to the early days of Spider-Man for my liking, and the Britain he inhabited was far more like Britain as Americans imagine it to be than it was like the Britain I actually inhabited. Thus we got cobbled streets, gas lamps, knights in shining armour, highwaymen, wizards, sceptres and the Royal Family.

After issues #3 and #4, I didn't see the comic again until after it had switched to the format of Marvel UK's other mags, meaning glossy covers and black and white interiors. To be honest, it was a format I preferred. The colour had always been a bit too bright for my liking and the matt covers had made it feel like it wasn't a proper Marvel mag.

Sadly, the loss of colour robbed it of its special smell - but it now more than made up for that by being drawn by John Buscema and Tom Palmer.

This did strike me at the time as being something akin to a miracle. Bearing in mind Marvel had initially refused to use Buscema  on Conan The Barbarian because he was too expensive, his presence on this title does suggest the paymasters in New York were taking the comic surprisingly seriously. As did the decision to team our hero up with Captain America and SHIELD in a battle to prevent the Red Skull bumping off Jimmy Carter and James Callaghan. It does seem like the parent company was making a genuine attempt to turn the thing into a success, even if they didn't really know how to achieve it.

Sadly, Buscema didn't hang around forever and the art soon deteriorated, as did the stories. By the time his own title had failed and the good Captain had moved into the pages of Super Spider-Man, I'd come to regard it as a strip to avoid and I can't tell you how relieved I was when it was finally scrapped and replaced with something else.

But there was a surprise in store - because, some time later, a mysterious figure turned up in the pages of the Black Knight's strip in Marvel UK's Hulk comic.

It turned out that that figure was Captain Britain who was now involved in a strange Lord of the Rings type fantasy. It did strike me at the time that the new strip seemed classier than the old one but, not being a fan of that particular style of Fantasy, I couldn't be altogether sure. I have a feeling it was now being drawn by Steve Parkhouse but don't quote me on that.

What I could be sure of was that when I next encountered him, I definitely liked what I saw. Now he was in the pages of the monthly Mighty World of Marvel mag and was being produced by Alans Moore and Davis. It was instantly obvious that the whole thing was a drastic cut above anything I'd seen from the character before, as he found himself in an alternate Britain ruled by a seemingly all-powerful Enoch Powell type intent on making Britain not at all a nice place to be. Reader, thank God that prophecy never came true and that Britain now has no one in power making Enoch Powell type noises. This tale was far darker, far more stylish and far more potent than we'd come to expect of the stiff Spider-Man knock-off we'd once been given.

Sadly, after a few months of this, I lost touch with him again until, in the early 1990s, I bought a trade paperback that reprinted his adventures from the immediate post-Moore era.

My knowledge of his career since then can only be called sketchy. I believe he got dragged into Marvel's mutant corner, despite not being a mutant himself. Beyond that, I can say little. But I do know that his sister Betsy became Psylocke and somehow changed from being a blind, posh, non-mutant Englishwoman to being a Japanese mutant ninja martial arts expert. Comics. You have to love them.

So, was Captain Britain a good idea?

No. He was a terrible idea, a British super-hero, for a British audience, created by people with virtually no knowledge of Britain and cast from a mould far too derivative of already existing Marvel heroes. Still, after a number of false starts, he finally came good in the end, so I suppose we should be glad of his creation even if it was all a terrible mistake.

October 6th, 1976 - Marvel UK, 40 years ago this week.

You could never claim the 1970s wasn't the Marvel Age of Comics.

Why?

Because, on this night in 1976, BBC One was broadcasting legendary children's series Fingerbobs, the show that introduced me to the word, "Scampi."

As we all recall, the Bob Harris-esque presenter was always introduced by a name that was never totally clear and might have been Boffy but might not have been.

However, thanks to a fit of investigative journalism that Woodward and Bernstein would envy, I've just discovered his real name was Rick Jones. That's the kind of place the 1970s was. We had Peter Parker in charge of the railways and Rick Jones in charge of the Fingerbobs.

And then they claim the 1970s lacked glamour.

But they were about to get a whole lot glamorouser - because this was the week in which a brand new super-hero hit the streets of Britain. A super-hero like no other.

Needless to say, I'll be looking further into that development, at the weekend. But, in the meantime, let's see what was occurring on Planet Marvel UK just as any unsold copies of our favourite mags were being removed from the shelves to make way for that epochal event and others.

There's absolutely nothing on that cover that gives me any hint as to what happens inside the comic, other than that it involves humans and apes. I had already suspected that might be the case.

The inking on that cover looks quite Tom Palmeresque. I wonder if it was indeed by he?

The Gremlin's back!

But what of his father? Has the Gargoyle ever returned from the dead?

If not, does this make him Marvel's longest-running dead character?

It would appear, from the blurb at the top of the cover, that this is the legendary issue where the Vision beats up a Skrull.

If so, I did feel at the time that this instalment was the high watermark of the Kree/Skrull saga and I was most impressed by Neal Adams' ability to draw spaceships and bruises.

It never fails. Every time Mysterio shows up, Spidey starts to doubt his sanity. You'd think he'd have realised by now that it's all done with trickery.

It's that bizarre FF story Stan Lee Frankensteined together from unpublished art Jack Kirby left behind and newly inserted panels by John Buscema.

It'd be nice to say it was a ploy that worked but it was a very strange and jarring read at the time, which left me baffled as to how such a circumstance had arisen. It was only with the rise of the internet that I finally found out.

In other news, we get the return of Batroc Ze Leapair. I first encountered him in the pages of Iron Fist, via The Avengers comic. In that tale, he seemed a far more dangerous foe than he subsequently proved to be anywhere else. Admittedly, that was probably because I didn't know who he was at that time and thus didn't know any better.