Monster of the Day #1354

Whereas she turned out to have a tendency to put *on* weight, so really, who had it worse here?

  • Remember, ladies: Skeletons prefer blondes.

  • Gamera977

    She should have suspected something fishy, he doesn’t have just A skeleton in his closet but THREE of them…

  • KeithB

    Hmm, could this be the ur-bad girl? She is paying the price for being lured into some hanky-panky.

  • Luke Blanchard

    VENUS, and MENACE, were Marvel titles, although Marvel didn’t use the Marvel brand-name in the 50s.

    VENUS is an unusual case, as it started out as a fantasy romantic comedy title, and ended as a horror one. Its heroine was the goddess Venus, who in the opening issue came to Earth and went to work for a magazine. Marvel has published a collection of the first nine issues in its Marvel Masterworks series.

    #19 was the last issue. The cover was drawn by Bill Everett, who worked on Venus’s feature from #13. He was the Sub-Mariner’s creator. He showed a faculty for horror in the 50s.
    I’ve read one story from his run, the cover story from #16. In this Venus is like a female investigating reporter, except she puts on her evening dress-like costume for the adventure’s climax. She seems to have no superpowers. In the tale she accidentally visits the 13th floor of an office building and finds everyone on the floor has been killed by living stone gargoyles.

  • Eric Hinkle

    ‘VENUS… started out as a fantasy romantic comedy title, and ended as a horror one.” Wow, Marvel seriously needs to reprint this one in one of their big collections. I would definitely buy it just to see how bizarre it got.

    And thanks once again for that comics history lesson, Mister Blanchard.

  • Luke Blanchard

    For more, look for the BlogSpot blog “Timely-Atlas-Comics”, which has a post on the VENUS Marvel Masterworks collection. Since the volume ends with #9 it doesn’t reach the horror stuff. The MENACE series has been collected in another volume, and the blog has a post on that too.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thank for that suggestion. I just read it, and wow but VENUS was one bizarre comic.

  • Ken_Begg

    Didn’t they make Captain America the host of a horror comic for a while too? It was the fashion of the time.

  • Luke Blanchard

    For its last two issues CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS was retitled CAPTAIN AMERICA’S WEIRD TALES. #74 had a lead story in which Captain America fought the Red Skull in hell(1) and non-series horror stories. #75 just had non-series horror stories. As far as I can tell Cap wasn’t used as a host character in the horror tales, so he didn’t appear in the last issue.

    The logos used on the covers do say CAPTAIN AMERICA’S WEIRD TALES, but they emphasise the WEIRD TALES part so much it looks like that’s the title. So why did the final issue keep the CAPTAIN AMERICA’S part of the name? Possibly the publisher couldn’t just call it WEIRD TALES as the pulp of that name was still running, but that’s just a guess.

    (1) It sounds like a great premise, but it turns out the story was only six pages.

  • Ken_Begg

    Perhaps it was one of those postal issues where keeping the numbering meant you didn’t have to buy a new license for the series.