The cover to The Atlas Comics Library No. 2: Venus Vol. 2, featuring an old-school sci-fi illustration of a blonde woman in a long red dress pointing toward a rocket soaring through the sky. Below her, a man in an astronaut suit looks up toward her. Stars and planets hang in the sky, while dragon-like creatures lurk behind them.
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Bill Everett, Dr. Michael J. Vassallo

The Atlas Comics Library No. 2: Venus Vol. 2

On sale date: April 16, 2024

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 in particular 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 '50's 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 the first volume 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.


The Atlas Comics Library No. 2: Venus Vol. 2 is part of the Atlas Comics series.

Praise

"This is a beautiful presentation of a very strange time in Marvel's publishing history. And a fun, very weird book to read." — Cinema Sentries

Specs

Pages
310
Format
Hardback
Color
Full-color.
Dimensions
8.8" × 11.7"
ISBN-13
9781683969198
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