Here's a panel from Marvel Two-in-One #33, dated November 1977. The Thing and his girlfriend Alicia are in England, on their way to visit Stonehenge, and somehow confident it won't lead into yet another fight with wizards and demons and things.
They're eight miles away from Stonehenge, according to what seems to be a wooden sign on a stake hammered into the roadside. Travelling from London, you'd think they'd be on the A303 and enjoying the views of Salisbury Plain, but in fact they seem to be taking some kind of dirt track through the Rocky Mountains. And driving on the wrong side of the road. But hey, at least the comic's creators haven't done the usual American thing and believed British road signs are in kilometres!
Will any readers write in to point out the inaccuracies? A thousand of them did, apparently...
Yes, good old Mason M. Aldrich wrote from Florida to say "I always thought the British used kilometers to measure distance!" - and the editor apologises and notes that a whole lot of other readers wrote in to say the exact same thing.
But hey, 1977 was a primitive time. I won't demand Mason be stripped of his no-prize, since he was writing at a time when I was less than a year old and hadn't yet got a blog where I tell the world what's what. But if you're American and reading this, please note that the British use miles to measure distance. Always have done.
(To be fair, I always used to think Americans used kilometres. I mean, America is a hi-tech, modern kind of place, naturally they'd be all up-to-date and metric, right? It's only old-fashioned places like Britain that would use old-fashioned imperial measurements. America wouldn't use anything "imperial", now would they? But now the internet exists and I've been over there a time or two, I understand that they do measure things in miles. We're two nations separated by a common system of measuring the distance to Stonehenge.)
