Star Trek for me. I loved the first three Star Wars movies (and the comics, and those four early novel spin-offs) but nothing since Return of the Jedi has really struck a chord with me, and I really disliked the three prequels. The Star Trek universe, however, has always entertained and fascinated me. It has its ups and downs; I could never get into Enterprise, and Voyager was often a bit hit and miss. But generally, I think Trek has the better characters and the more interesting themes.

Neither of them can compare to Doctor Who, though...

Avengers is the only long running book dating back to the Silver Age which I made a point of collecting a complete run of; I've any number of shorter run tites, and sizeable chunks of both JLA and the original X-Men, but Avengers #1-402 are the pride of my collection, and with the exception of much of the "kooky quartet" era before Roy Thomas came aboard, I love pretty much all of it. Admittedly, it gets a bit shaky after about issue #299, but the issues between #50 and about #277 are generally stuff I can read over and over again.

A slight divergence here, but just as an indication of how heavily Marvel UK were promoting Captain Britain at the time; the issue of their flagship weekly The Mighty World of Marvel which went on sale in the last week of January '77 (issue #226) carried this on its back cover, the second in a set of two "Marvel Cut-Ups", basically pictures of Marvel characters which the enterprising youngster could glue to a piece of card and cut around, providing a couple of cutting edge cardboard superhero figures to play with or pose. The previous issue had carried the first set, the Thing and the Hulk plus a couple of bent street lights, while issue #224 had carried a cut-out street scene for the figures to battle in. The Thing and the Hulk, of course, were very popular at the time so using them made perfect sense, but CB and his foe Hurricane can only really have been there to help promote the Captain's new title.

Thanks. I don't have very much time to dedicate to it right now, but it's fun going through that early stuff again. I reread the later stuff about once a year, but the early issues less often, so there's quite a bit I've forgotten.

All of it. Well, all except the last two pages of Marvel Super-Heroes #386, which is where Moore rather abruptly took over from Dave Thorpe. Basically, you get the CB strips from MSH #387-388, The Daredevils #1-11 and Mighty World of Marvel (Vol II) #7-13, plus a cover gallery and some rather nice little features on the character and on Alan Moore.

I guess they left out those first two pages because on their own they would't make much sense, and they didn't want to reprint any of Thorpe's stuff and have to pay him for it. But you don't really miss much, story wise.

I'd agree with that. It's where it all started to go wrong, and the line has never fully recovered.

If I were him, I'd have tried to distance myself from it, too. He'd have been better off sticking to what he knew he could do.