ATLAS COMICS LIBRARY HC VOL 02 VENUS

The Goddess of Love...and SF horror: The eagerly
anticipated single volume collecting the 10 rare
issues of the overstuffed Venus comics!
In the late 1940s, the first half of the Venus series from Marvel
Comics predecessors Timely and Atlas Comics was published as
a lighthearted romance comic about the goddess Venus taking
a job on Earth at a beauty magazine. Never a company to miss
a trend, Atlas began introducing more science fiction elements
in the 1950s, and eventually turned Venus' dating adventures
into a straight-out horror anthology.
Collected here, 70 years later and for the first time ever, is
that swift-changing second half of the 19-issue run. Future Marvel
stars Bill Everett (seven issues) and Werner Roth (three issues) take Venus to
heights of four-color weirdness and pre-Code horror ghastliness. Everett is given
free rein and seizes the opportunity: writing, drawing, and lettering twenty ghoulish
and goofy masterpieces, including classics like "Hangman's House," "The Day Venus
Vanished," "The House of Terror," "The Sealed Spectors," Tidal Wave of Terror," and
the phantasmagorical "Cartoonist's Calamity!" These stories showcase the brilliant
draftsmanship and storytelling of Everett, one of the giants of the 1940s and '50s
comic book industry. His slick, fluid line rendered at Timely/Atlas, from his seminal
god-child Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, to the atomic age Marvel Boy, is some
of the finest pre-Code horror this side of E.C.'s Graham Ingels.
Series editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo assisted in the compilation of Venus for
Marvel 13 years ago, and Fantagraphics is delighted to publish the horror half as
the second title in The Fantagraphics Atlas Comics Library.