The Sunday Honeys - Goddess Of Love!

It's Valentines Day and to celebrate the holiday I'm skipping the regularly scheduled Sunday Funnies feature and instead taking a look at one of the most fetching Atlas/Marvel era characters -- the Goddess of Love herself and reputedly the most beautiful girl in the world -- Venus. Venus had her own reasonably successful comic in the 50's when the comic book world was in a turmoil after the sundry public outcries for the medium to police itself or to just go away entirely. So comics were sanitized and to that end Marvel (called Atlas back then) published a girl's comic featuring the  Goddess of Love. 

Venus was launched at the same time as Marvel/Timely/Atlas titles Namora and Sun Girl. If you notice that all three star lovely dames then you hit the spot as apparently the scheme was to latch onto the growing girl market in comics. All three series lasted at least three issues then all were cancelled. Some of the leftover Venus tales appeared in other titles at the time. Then at some point it was decided to revive Venus with some tweaking of the concept and eventually the title last a cool nineteen issues. Now I'm not going to do an issue by issue reprise of this series for the simple reason I found such an analysis at this highly informative link. Written by Dr. Michael Vassallo, the acknowledged guru of Atlas Comics you'll find even more enlightening info on the character as well as a detailed breakdown of each of the first nine issues.  Vassallo identifies many of the artists on the title with the earliest issues having been drawn by George Klein who I fondly remember as an able inker over John Buscema on seminal issues of The Avengers and elsewhere. Artists like Ken Bald, Werner Roth and Bill Everett among others will contribute to the series eventually. 

These nine issues were gathered together and published by Marvel some years ago in their doughty Marvel Masterworks series. It's a handsome volume that I found somewhere for a discounted price as likely I'd never have brought it home otherwise. 

There has not been a second volume in the Masterworks series dedicated to Venus though it is crucial that it does happen. Most of the stories which evoked my admiration for the character, and all those by Bill Everett are in the later issues of the run.  Here are the covers. 

And below is a glimpse of what a volume like this might look like if it existed. 

I'm a fan of Marvel's Atlas days with heroes like Venus and Marvel Boy and Black Knight, first discovering these charactes and stories tucked away inside Marvel's copious reprint comic such as Marvel Tales and Fantasy Masterpieces among others. 

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