Venus (comic book)

Venus was an American romance comic book published by Marvel Comics in the United States. Running for 19 issues from 1948 until 1952 it transformed over its run from its romance led stories to finish as a science fiction and horror anthology. It is noted for introducing the Marvel character Venus and an early incarnation of Loki who would later become the nemesis of Marvel favorite Thor. The final three issues were published through Atlas Comics.

Publication history

Venus was first published by Marvel Comics in August 1948. Issue one starred the title character Venus, and was made up of three stories, two written by Stan Lee and penciled by George Klein and Ken Bald and a third was a one-page Hey Look! filler written and drawn by Harvey Kurtzman. Issue six saw the first Marvel Comics appearance of the god Loki, here acting as a villainous foil to Venus.

From issue 10 the title took on a science fiction slant, and included stories by Russ Heath and Joe Maneely. By issue 11 the comic added the slogan "Strange Stories of the Supernatural" and though the tales still included Venus and other supporting characters, the comic began to morph into a horror/sci-fi anthology. In issue 12 Loki is joined by Thor to rescue Venus from the clutches of the evil sultan Khorak, though this version of Thor is not recognized as a first appearance. By issue 17 the romance angle was dropped and Venus became a Horror anthology, the cover drawn by Bill Everett and is classed as a bondage comic cover as it shows Venus chained to a dungeon wall. Everett supplied the covers for the final two issues as well as interior art, and issue nineteen is a classic pre-Comic Code horror book cover with Venus being embraced by a living skeleton.

Venus (Frankie Avalon song)

"Venus" is a song written by Ed Marshall and Peter DeAngelis. The most successful and best-known recording of the track was done by Frankie Avalon and released in 1959 (see 1959 in music).

Background

Venus became Avalon's first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it spent five weeks atop the survey. The song also reached number ten on the R&B chart. The song's lyrics detail a man's plea to Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, to send him a girl to love and one who will love him as well. Billboard ranked it as the No. 4 song for 1959.

The song was covered in the United Kingdom by Dickie Valentine who spent a week at number 20 in the Singles Chart in May 1959, the week before Frankie Avalon reached the Top 20 with his original version.

In 1976, Avalon released a new disco version of "Venus". This helped revive the singer's career, as his success had been waning prior to its release and was Avalon's last Billboard Hot 100 hit. The re-recording of "Venus" peaking at number forty-six and at number one on the Easy Listening chart. Avalon was quoted describing the remake: "It was all right, but I still prefer the original."

Venus (Sirius XM)

Venus is a Sirius XM Radio station playing rhythmic pop from the 2000s through today similar to Pop2K,

Details

Venus is a Rhythmic Top 40 station with an emphasis on current-based Rhythmic Pop/Dance hits from the 2000s and today with recurrents from the 2000s, all commercial-free. The channel replaces Top 20 on 20, which officially signed off on July 16, 2014 at 12:04 AM after 14 years. The first song to be played on Venus was "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas. With the launch of Venus, the move will also give Sirius XM two channels with a Rhythmic-focused format, joining The Heat, whose direction favors current-based R&B/Hip-Hop hits.

With the addition of Pitbull's Globalization Radio, which was launched in 2015, Venus has shifted to Rhythmic Pop, allowing Globalization Radio to take on the current Rhythmic/Dance fare, Venus was dropped from the satellites, allowing users can still hear Venus online.

References

External Links

Tannhäuser (opera)

Tannhäuser (full title Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg / Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle) is an 1845 opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, based on two German legends; Tannhäuser, the legendary medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centers on the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love, a theme running through much of Wagner's mature work.

Composition history

Sources

Wagner wove a variety of sources into the opera narrative. According to his autobiography, he was inspired by finding the story in "a Volksbuch (popular book) about the Venusberg", which he claimed "fell into his hands", although he admits knowing of the story from the Phantasus of Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann's story, Der Kampf der Sänger (The Singer's Contest). Tieck's tale, which names the hero "Tannenhäuser", tells of the minstrel-knight's amorous adventures in the Venusberg, his travels to Rome as a Pilgrim, and his repudiation by the pope. To this Wagner added material from Hoffmann's story, from Serapions-Brüder (1819), describing a song contest at the Wartburg castle, a castle which featured prominently in Thuringian history. Heinrich Heine had provided Wagner with the inspiration for Der fliegende Holländer and Wagner again drew on Heine for Tannhäuser. In Heine's sardonic essay Elementargeister (Elemental spirits), there appears a poem about Tannhäuser and the lure of the grotto of Venus, published in 1837 in the third volume of Der Salon. Other possible sources include Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's play Der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1819).

Book

A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page. A set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format is known as an electronic book, or e-book.

Books may also refer to works of literature, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels and sometimes other types of books (for example, biographies), a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, and so on). An avid reader of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, bookworm.

A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore. Books can also be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 unique titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, though sales of e-books declined in the first half of 2015.

Keturi Brūkšniai

Keturi brūkšniai is a polemical book by Lithuanian historian Edvardas Gudavičius, written in the Lithuanian language. It was published in 2002 by Aidai in Vilnius (ISBN 9955-445-55-6). It does not have any proper title, but publishers and book sellers usually put four dashes (Lithuanian: Keturi brūkšniai) as the title.

References

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.

Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the musical theatre works of American creators like George M. Cohan. The Princess Theatre musicals and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing (1931) were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments of the early 20th century and led to such groundbreaking works as Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943). Some of the most famous and iconic musicals through the decades that followed include West Side Story (1957), The Fantasticks (1960), Hair (1967), A Chorus Line (1975), Les Misérables (1985), The Phantom of the Opera (1986), Rent (1996), The Producers (2001) and Wicked (2003).