This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post here at Balladeer’s Blog looks at every Marvel issue published in January 1978.
SPIDER-MAN Vol 1 #176 (Jan 1978)
Title: He Who Laughs Last …
Villain: Green Goblin III
Synopsis: Peter Parker’s Aunt May has joined the Grey Panthers and has her 987th heart attack at a demonstration. Peter and Mary Jane Watson visit her in the hospital.
Seeing that she is recovering just fine, the pair leave. Peter stops by the office of psychiatrist Dr. Bart Hamilton, who has been treating Peter’s friend Harry Osborn ever since Harry’s drug problems made him become the second Green Goblin. The office has been trashed.
Peter becomes Spider-Man and gets to the apartment that Harry shares with Flash Thompson. He finds Flash unconscious on the floor and the Green Goblin ransacking Harry’s bedroom. Spider-Man attacks the villain, assuming it’s Harry in the costume, but in a few issues it will turn out to be Dr. Hamilton himself, who manipulated his patient Harry Osborn to find his late father Norman Osborn’s Green Goblin costume and weaponry.
For the cliffhanger ending, the hard-pressed Goblin grabs Flash’s unconscious form and throws him out the window, seemingly to his death. Continue reading
ADVENTURE COMICS Vol 1 #48 (Mar 1940) 
NOTE: Over the years, changes would make it so that Miraclo granted Rex Tyler the strength of 50 men. Due to parental concerns about promoting drug use since Rex popped Miraclo pills, for a time it was changed to a Miraclo RAY that would increase Hourman’s strength. Other times it was retconned so that Hourman’s costume was enchanted and it was the source of his powers. 
UNDERWATER HOUSE (1899) – Written by Frank Bailey Millard, this short story was first published in the March 1899 issue of The Black Cat magazine. 
SPIDER-WOMAN Vol 1 #17 (Aug 1979) 
Our heroine slips away from Eric to try getting back her costume without exposing her secret identity. At one point, the drunken woman dressed as Spider-Woman falls off the deck of the mountaintop disco. Jessica uses her powers to save the woman and recover her costume before the drunk knows what’s what. 
MARVEL TEAM-UP Vol 1 #53 (Jan) 
The genetically engineered human/ animal hybrid creature Woodgod (at right) – also immune to the nerve gas – is still being contained in the depopulated town by Major Del Tremens and his troops at Tranquility Base, who caused the nerve gas leak. 
THE ULTIMATE INHERITORS (1914) – Written by Berg Bellair. This is a very entertaining work of vintage or “ancient” science fiction and is especially noteworthy for the way it anticipates the many “big bug” movies of the 1950s and later. 
CAPTAIN WIZARD 
AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1914) – This tale was originally serialized in several issues of All-Story Weekly in 1914, then was assembled in novel form in 1922. American mining heir David Innes and his much older inventor friend Abner Perry test-drive Abner’s diesel-punk subterranean tunnel-drilling vehicle the Iron Mole. 
DYNAMO 
BLACK LION 
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