Venus was one of several heroines introduced by Marvel at the tail end of the 1940s. Her title underwent a curious sequence of transformations in comics genres in its 19-issue run, starting as a glamour comic, becoming a romance comics, then a science fiction comic, and finally a horror comic. Throughout her run, Venus always remained the same character: the Olympian goddess with the power of Love, who came to Earth from the planet Venus to live among mortals for a while. It’s interesting to speculate how these adventures jibe with the modern day Marvel Universe. Yes, I know she was involved in the origin of The Champions, and I’m aware that Jeff Parker later retooled the “Avengers of the 1950s” from What If? #9 into the Agents of Atlas, but those appearances are almost mutually exclusive. The most obvious explanation is that she’s not an Olympian goddess at all, but really one of Jack Kirby’s Eternals. That’s not the tack Jeff Parker took, but I guess that’s the difference between a professional writer and a fanboy. Still, it’s fun to imagine that there’s a little bit of truth in both versions of her backstory, especially when one considers one of her early antagonists was none other than Loki. I’ve been curious about this series most of my life, and whereas I expected to enjoy it, I didn’t expect it to fire my imagination to the degree it has. The Marvel Boy, Black Claw, and now Venus Marvel Masterworks make an excellent complement to Jeff Parker’s (now sadly defunct) Agents of Atlas. Volume one collects the humor/glamour/romance run, but the best is yet to come. After the title switches to science fiction/horror, Bill Everett takes over as artist!
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Great discussion! Thanks for keeping it going in my absence.
Or maybe the story is just wrong, and it was Hephaestus/Vulcan all along
"Or maybe the story is just wrong." You know who else "Thor" might be? Hercules. They have always been more-or-less Greek/Norse counterparts throughout the "Marvel Age of Comics." This discussion is going to go beyond the actual "Atlas Era Venus" and I plan to take a closer look at that angle when I get to Champions #1-3.
It’s pretty sticky territory. Do the Greco-Roman gods have no power in Cassarobia because it’s presumably an Islamic country? (“Sultan” is an Islamic title, bearing with it religious significance as well as secular authority.) If so, why does Loki have power there? And why do the Greco-Roman gods have power in, say, the USA, which is predominantly a Christian country?
As Bob is fond of pointing out regarding early Doctor Who stories, we fans put a lot more thought into them than the writers did.
This is as good a place as any to note that I find the Venus-Whit-Della “triangle” to be tedious and an absolute waste of time.
I like to think that Della wasn't as bad as she was portrayed and, after Venus had left them, Whit and Della were happily married.
The reporter is a stock character in comics, much like in movies and TV, because they need no excuse to be at the scene of the crime. In my master's thesis, which I’m trying to re-write as a book...
I'm sure you'll get a lot of mileage out of Venus.
When was the last time Venus did a story on anything related to the magazine’s name?
Whitney Hammond should just change the name.
Good lord, pre-Code was awesome!
Wasn't it?
Heinrich says he’s going to Mars, where legends indicate the presence of the Fountain of Youth. What legends?... I think Everett invented this out of whole cloth.
Ya think?
The mythological Adonis wasn’t a god, despite this story.
And despite Star Trek's "Who Mourns for Adonis?"
The leader of the underground people suffers from plot-induced stupidity.
An "idiot plot" requires all the characters to act like idiots for it to work.
[Lenz's "revolutionary animated photographic paper] is a strange invention, and a pretty pointless scheme.
It occurs to me that now that the Queen of the Gypsies has shut down Roberto's beauty shop racket, there's a void that needs to be filled when it comes to supplying "dancing girls" to passing "carnivals."
Robert Browning using "twat" in his sentimental Victorian poem
The word "squaw" which we all learned in elementary school originally had the same connotation.
Now that I'm back home, I hope to pick this discussion up where I left off either later today or tomorrow.
Robert Browning using "twat" in his sentimental Victorian poem
The word "squaw" which we all learned in elementary school originally had the same connotation.
My elementary school was ten years earlier than yours. Much later, I learned that the term “squaw” was offensive, supposedly because it translated as “whore.”
VENUS #16:
First Story: "Where Gargoyles Dwell" - Venus goes to visit the offices of CorpCo construction on the 13th floor of the Graycar building, but is informed by the elevator operator that there is no 13th floor (which is odd, because she had been there last week. He takes her to the 12th, then one floor up to the 14th. She decides to walk down and finds the 13th floor via the stairs. It is completely wrecked and is occupied by living stone gargoyles. She finds one survivor, the stenographer, hiding under a desk. It was the stenographer's first day on the job, and she doesn't have a clue what is going on. Venus leads her to the fire escape and both women make their way down to the street from the outside.
She reports to Hammond, and they both return with the police to investigate, but guess what? No 13th floor! Whit and the cops leaves, but Venus stays behind and shinnies up the cable in the elevator shaft all the way to the 13th floor and gains entry that way. The gargoyles ar eback, as well as a dead ringer for the stenographer who introduces herself as Sylvia Corpo, Queen of the Gargoyles. Her father destroyed the previous building which stood on that spot, "but he threw all the gargoyles away... and the poor souls had no place to go! So I made a home for them on the 13th floor of this building!" They fight, Sylvia falls down the elevator shaft and that pretty much wraps it up. Later, a cop discovers Venus's hat and glove wedged between the 12th and 14th floors. Did it really happen? Or was it all a dream? Atlas/ Everett is big on these unexplained endings.
This story reminds me very much (or the opposite, I suppose), of a Superman story I read when I was a kid, Action Comics #448.
There was also a gargoyle story reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell (echoing the story's title) #34
Second Story: "The Ashes of Death" - A man and a woman attend the cremation of her husband. Jane is uneasy about witnessing "this grusome business," but Henry assures her "it's the law, you know!" )I don't know in which state this story is set, but I've never heard of a mandatory requirement to watch one's spouse be cremated.) Later, the wife disappears while picking up the ashes, the fifth such disappearance at this particular crematorium. Again, what does it take to arrouse the interest of the police in this town?
Posing as a writer researching a mystery novel, Venus goes snooping around and meets Mr. Natas, the owner/operator of the cemetary/crematorium. (If you notice anything hinky about the spelling of his name, file that information away for now.) He soon becomes suspicious of her questions and kicks her out. This leads to Plan B: The next day, Della poses as Venus's cousin. In order to investigate the crematorium from the inside, Venus pretends to have died and Della is arranging the cremation of her body, which is not suspicioous at all (another example of an "idiot plot"). Whit is there, too, pretending to be the driver of the hearse. Della pretends to faint, Venus slips out of the coffin and Whit puts a sandbag inside.
Soon after Della "recovers," Natas drugs her, then attempts to wheel her into the furnace. Venus reveals herself and Della only palmed the pill Natas gave her. Natas panics: "Y-Y-Y-YI-I-IPE! N-no! NO!! Not more 'walking dead'! It can't happen here! I just killed her a few minutes ago! She's not supposed to walk again till she gets to Hades--and she hasn't been through the fire yet!!!" Then "Natas" himself dives into the furnace, but later, no human remains are found. Was her really... Satan? And if so, how does he tie in which "Loki" and "Lucifer" et al? I've got some ideas on that score.
Third Story: "The House of Terror!" - Venus goes to lunch with Betty, one of those Beauty magazine co-workers who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Betty is worried about her mother, a widow who remarried about a year ago. Betty suspects her step-father is trying to drive her mother insane so that he can control her money. To cut to the chase, he is, using a combination of hallucinagenic gas and some props. (Noteably, Lee/Ditko would have Mysterio use the "room flip" ploy a decade later against Spider-Man.) Venus turns the tables on the step-father by exposing him to the gas, and he falls down the stairs while running from ghosts and breaks his neck. But Venus disn't fake any ghosts. Where they real or not?
Dr. Michael Vassalo said, "This is gloriously crazy stuff!" about the first story in this issue, but that description really applies to all three.
VENUS #17:
[NOTE pre-Code bondage cover.]
First Story: "Tower of Death!" - A man in England is being haunted by a ghost and he calls Venus for help. (Apparently she's a paranormal investigator now, because why wouldn't she be?) The Englishman murdered his wife ten years ago, then had his step-daughter sealed in the tower room, and murdered the men he hired to due the job. After that he planter his step-daughters clothes on a nearby riverbank and framed the workmen for the murders. But now ten years have passed and an eerie blue light has begun to shine every night from the tower window. If he didn't want this story to come to light, calling in Venus wasn't the wisest move he could have made.
Venus arrives and, on her first night in the castle, encounters Cathy, the "ghost" of the step-daughter, though the previously-unrevealed power Venus has to see and talk with departed spirits. Cathy tells Venus how she witnessed the murder of her mother but was unable to do anything about it because she was just a little girl at the time. Through a chink in the through which she observed where her step-father buried the workmen. On the second day of her captivity, Cathy discovered a secret passage which she has been using, undiscovered, ever since.
The next day Venus goes into the swamp where the murdered workmen are supposed to be buried, but the Englishman finds her just as she realizes that there are no bodies buried there! This revalation causes the Englishman to practically confess on the spot and sends his running off to the tower to investigate. By the time Venus and Cathy arrive, the room has been resealed with fresh concrete.Entering the room through the secret passage, the two woman find the man dead of fright. Cathy wanted to frighten him, but she didn't want to kill him. When they call in the police and investigate, two skeletons spattered with fresh concrete are now found in the grave of the two workmen. Venus explains she knew Cathy wasn't a ghost when she realized that ghosts don't age and Cathy was now a young woman instead of a little girl. then she invites Cathy to return with her to the United States and Cathy accepts.
Second Story: "The Cartoonist's Calamity!" - Dr. Vassallo refers to this story as "this title's tour-de-force masterpiece, the Venus magnum opus." I'm not sure that's true (most Venus stories are six pages, and this one is only five), but it is kind of bonkers. The previously-unseen cartoon editor of Beauty magazine, Jimmy trogers, doesn't show up for work one day, and Hammond sends Venus over to his house to look for him. She finds him being terrorized by a group of beings that would give Basil Wolverton nightmares, and soon detemines that they are Rogers' own drawing come to life. Venus convinces him to draw a "hero" who leaps off the page to save them. Then, in a scene directly from one of Walt Disney's early "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons, Rogers draws a panel of the hero leaping back into a bottle of ink, and the hero disappears from the real world.
Third Story: "The Stone Man!" - At a whopping eight pages, this story has a better shot of being labled the issue's "tour de force magnum opus," but I'll leave it up to you to decide. 30 foot tall statues of amphibious creatures begin appearing all over the world: New York, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Lenningrad, Moscow. No one can figure out where they come from, until Venus and Hammond witness one ariseing from the sea. They are merely curious, but soon turn to stone in the upper atmosphere. Hammond [phones the story in to the newspapersa but no one believes him. Then it starts to rain and the two New York giants (heh) come to life. The surface world then begins to destroy the remaining statues and the survivors flee to the sea, vowing revenge. And that's pretty much it. As Vassallo puts it, "They came, they destroyed, they left."
And there's one scene in the middle of the story in which Whitney asks Venus to marry him and she refuses.
About #17's "Tower of Death"'s twist ending... am I weird for wondering how and where Cathy has been living for the last few years? Apparently she led a normal life for about ten years and just very recently decided to return to the place where her mother died in order to be spooky and hopefully scare the killer. A bit of a long shot.
Also, where is that fresh concrete coming from? Who is putting it in place?
Cathy had been living in the tower all along.
As Bob is fond of pointing out regarding early Doctor Who stories, we fans put a lot more thought into them than the writers did.
But we’re having fun! I think we’re having fun. We’re having fun, aren’t we?
I like to think that Della wasn't as bad as she was portrayed and, after Venus had left them, Whit and Della were happily married.
Awww. The power of love in action.
And despite Star Trek's "Who Mourns for Adonis?"
Adonis never appears in that episode. The lead “god” is Apollo. The episode’s title comes from a poem by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s husband, Percy. (OK, he was a famous poet. But she’s more famous now!)
VENUS #16
First Story: "Where Gargoyles Dwell"
Did this precede all of Marvel's titles with similar construction? Where Monsters Dwell, Where Creatures Roam, etc. Or was there an antecedent to all of these constructions somewhere else? I guess I'm asking: Where did this common comic book construction originate?
Venus goes to visit the offices of CorpCo construction on the 13th floor of the Graycar building, but is informed by the elevator operator that there is no 13th floor (which is odd, because she had been there last week).
As I started reading this, I thought: “Wait, I’ve read this before.” Sure enough, it was reprinted back in 1972 in Marvel Spotlight #2, an oversize 25-center where the lead story introduced Werewolf by Night.
Two things struck the 14-year-old Captain enough back then that stuck with me over the years.
One was the crazed look in Sylvia Corpo’s eyes when she attacked Venus. Everett did crazy really well.
The other was the strange visual of immobile gargoyles flying around like somebody off-panel throwing bookends. Since they were immobile, they were always looking down, leading with top of their head, which is a strange way to fly. And somehow they were ripping people to shreds, just by … butting them to death?
I’m surprised Everett didn’t give them movement, because the visual would have been less ridiculous and having claws out would be scarier. But maybe he was going for ridiculous. Because these stories are pretty over the top.
Did it really happen? Or was it all a dream? Atlas/ Everett is big on these unexplained endings.
The gloves caught between floors was evidence enough for 14-year-old me, and still is.
This story reminds me very much (or the opposite, I suppose), of a Superman story I read when I was a kid, Action Comics #448.
There was also a gargoyle story reprinted in Where Monsters Dwell (echoing the story's title) #34.
At least those gargoyles could move! Everett’s sad sacks were flunky bookends.
Second Story: "The Ashes of Death"
Posing as a writer researching a mystery novel, Venus goes snooping around and meets Mr. Natas, the owner/operator of the cemetery/crematorium.
Hold on, now! Everybody knows “Natas” is Satan backwards! And that Alucard is Dracula backwards! And that Yobrepus is Superboy backwards! You always reverse weird names to see what they spell backwards!
Oh wait, that’s something comic book readers know to do. I guess our heroes have better things to do than read comic books.
The next day, Della poses as Venus's cousin.
Yay, Della gets to be one of the heroes! At last!
Venus pretends to have died and Della is arranging the cremation of her body, which is not suspicious at all (another example of an "idiot plot"). Whit is there, too, pretending to be the driver of the hearse. Della pretends to faint, Venus slips out of the coffin and Whit puts a sandbag inside.
All it takes for this cunning scheme to fail is for the funeral director to open the lid of the coffin to make sure he’s got the right body. Which he would.
Also, it’s a darn good thing that Della palmed the drug Natas gave her or she’d be dead. It was a deadly poison. That kinda startled me, because usually in comics villain-drugs knock you out harmlessly. Gotta love pre-Code books.
Then “Natas” himself dives into the furnace, but later, no human remains are found. Was her really... Satan? And if so, how does he tie in which “Loki” and “Lucifer” et al? I’ve got some ideas on that score.
Bedivere: “There are ways of telling whether she’s a witch.”
Peasant: “There are? Tell us!”
Crowd: “Tell us!”
Yeah, tell us!
“Thru the Lens”
I know you don’t normally discuss the non-Venus stories, but this 4-page short also rang a bell. I had read it before, too!
I looked it up, and sure enough, it was first reprinted in The X-Men #88—back when X-Men was an oversize 25-cent reprint title. The lead story reprinted X-Men #40, with a monster that looked like Frankenstein’s monster but turned out not to be, which I had already read in its original form.
I really was a rabid collector back then, wasn’t I?
Anyway, the idea of the atmosphere being ignited by science gone wrong sounded vaguely familiar to me then, because I’d read that it was a concern during the Manhattan Project. I don’t know if that’s where Stan Lee and Joe Maneely got the idea for this story, but it was compounded by the science of starlight being thousands of years old by the time it reaches us. Some neat concepts being thrown around here, especially for children of the ‘50s, at whom these stories were aimed.
“Who says comics aren’t educational?” — Jeff of Earth-J, 2024
Third Story: "The House of Terror!"
A slight story that Venus solves easily. More crazy eyes, though!
Venus turns the tables on the step-father by exposing him to the gas, and he falls down the stairs while running from ghosts and breaks his neck. But Venus didn't fake any ghosts. Where they real or not?
Venus says “Yes, Betty! I’m afraid your step-father’s manufactured “ghosts” finally took over—at least in his own mind. … All I did was encourage it a bit—by permeating the basement with the same anaesthetic gas he used on us last night!”
That’s good enough for me: under the effects of a hallucinogenic gas, the step-father's guilty conscience conjured up the very thing he was faking. But yeah, Everett likes to suggest an open-ended story, even when he provides a ready explanation.
One of the free comics I picked up today was a reprint of Atlas stories-- I don't know if any are "Venus" tales. I will report back later and also foist by obligatory video on everyone.
Nods solemnly. "Aye, let it be so."
But we’re having fun! I think we’re having fun. We’re having fun, aren’t we?
Yeah, but don't anyone tell our wives.
Adonis never appears in that episode. The lead “god” is Apollo.
I knew that. I hang my head in shame.
Did this precede all of Marvel's titles with similar construction?
The two you mention were both reprint titles launched in 1970. As far as I know, this is the earliest instance.
Yeah, tell us!
Patience, Grasshopper. We've still got the death of the god Neptune to get deal with in #18.
I know you don’t normally discuss the non-Venus stories
Some pretty good artists' work is on display there... Joe Maneely, Gene Colan, etc.
A slight story that Venus solves easily.
I'm afraid that someone reading just my summaries might think, "That doesn't sound so great," but it's the wonky stories in combination with the bizarre visuals.
One of the free comics I picked up today was a reprint of Atlas stories--
That's a good choice. I've already read mine, as well as all my other FCBD picks.
I don't know if any are "Venus" tales.
The last one is ("The Kiss of Death"). The cover, too, is from Venus #19.
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