Sunday, July 26, 2015

Covers gallery: some short-lived fantasy and horror fiction magazines: the brilliant, the poorly designed, and the ridiculous

Fantasy Magazine/Fantasy Fiction (1953):
The first fantasy fiction magazine edited by Lester Del Rey, who would later edit the first short run of Worlds of Fantasy, then have a sustained run as the fantasy-fiction editor at Ballantine, then officially Del Rey Books. All four covers are by Hannes Bok.





















































































































































Fear! (1960)
The horror title from Great American Publications, also including The Saint Magazine and Fantastic Universe, newly acquired (and the latter soon folded). Only two issues were published.











































































Shock Tales,  Suspense (both 1959); Thriller (1962)
Myron Fass, one of the more prolific publishers of exploitation magazines over the latter half of the 20th Century (and perhaps best remembered as the producer of some of the more durable imitators of Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie with his Eerie Tales line of black & white horror comics magazines in the latter '60s and early '70s), apparently is responsible for these magazines, the first two more or less the same magazine (and perhaps the only issues published, even though Suspense is labeled #4), and the last having three known issues...all with similar amateurish photography as the interior illustration for what can be called "confessions-style" attempts at horror fiction, perhaps masquerading clumsily as true accounts. Note model recurrence.











































































All images courtesy Galactic Central
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Saturday, July 25, 2015

ca. October 1950: PLANET STORIES, STARTLING STORIES, THRILLING WONDER STORIES and their companions as GALAXY debuts, conclusion/part 5

Cover by Allen Anderson?
read this issue at Archive.org
Part 1
Part 2 
Part 3 
Part 4
As readers of the previous installments might know, Galaxy Science Fiction magazine made a big splash in sf circles and beyond with its October 1950 first issue, as part of an effort by a very successful European magazine publisher trying establish some lucrative US projects, after their international hit in various languages, the all-ages romance comics title released here as Fascination, flopped. Galaxy, however, was an immediate success, if not the kind of huge moneymaker World Editions was hoping for...and it was widely hailed in the sf community, with good reason, as the best new sf magazine to arrive in at least a year, when heavily fantasy-oriented The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction launched, and possibly ever (see Robert Silverberg's brief testimonial in Part 1).  But the tendency to discount the contribution and quality of many of the magazines already in place at Galaxy's foundation (and at least one just after, Damon Knight's Worlds Beyond) are, by me, unfortunate at best, and for this last installment, we deal with three of the best extant rivals of Galaxy at its birth, and their certainly not-bad reprint companions. 

 Love Romances Publishing Co./Fiction House; 
Jerome Bixby, editor
If any sf magazine was more loved and more mocked, with only some justice, than Planet Stories, I'm not sure which title that might be.  Planet was the epitome of adventure sf magazines; despite its title for today's literary taxonomists in sf circles, it was the unabashed home of space opera as well as planetary romance (is your adventure in free space or on a planetary or other gravitational body?), and also would publish rather more sedate pieces, not least as one of the first regular markets for Ray Bradbury. In fact, among Bradbury's first professional publications was his collaboration with the single greatest writer as well as the heart and soul of Planet throughout its 1939-1955 run, Leigh Brackett. While most of Planet's editors throughout the 1940s apparently barely demonstrated knowing how to properly hold a red pencil, they were fortunate in having Brackett as a passionate and prolific contributor of some of the best and most heartfelt adventure sf yet published. And she wasn't alone...actually, throughout the history of the magazine, it published no little good or better work from a range of the best writers in the field, including many who were also stars over at the much more widely respected Astounding Science Fiction, where Robert Heinlein served as the primary example of what that magazine could produce...but, unfortunately, the 1940s Planet editors
Cover by Kelly Freas
seemed just as happy to take in the writing of the likes of Stanley Mullen, some of the clumsiest bits of prose you don't want to read. But with the appointment of Jerome Bixby to the editorship, officially under the founding and magazine group editor Malcolm Reiss,  the old crew of writers, such as Brackett, Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Nelson Bond and the wildly uneven Ross Rocklynne, were supplemented by Poul Anderson, Charles L. Harness, Margaret St. Clair, Allen Kim Lang, John D. MacDonald and others (including Bixby himself) who were just coming into their own, and writing often brilliant fiction by any standard. (Unfortunately, Bixby also published a Mullen or two, whether because he inherited the clunking stories in inventory or not, I don't know.)  Like Columbia's magazines and Marvel Tales, Planet and its stablemates at Fiction House were also cousins to a flourishing line of comic books; Bixby was also editing Jungle Stories, the original home of Tarzan clone Ki-Gor, who with his pal Sheena, Queen of the Jungle were major figures in the likes of Jungle Comics, which had as a stablemate Planet Comics. I don't know if Bixby was also editing Detective Book or any of their other crime-fiction magazines, which would also run Bradbury's fiction...or if Brackett sold much to their cf titles, as she was beginning to establish her crime-fiction writing career in the early '40s, which led directly to being hired by Howard Hawks to work on the script for the Bogart & Bacall-starring film adaptation of The Big Sleep from the Raymond Chandler novel...and her subsequent Hollywood career, which included adapting The Long Goodbye for the 1970s film, and, just before her death, writing the first treatment and version for the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. Brackett's non-adventure sf novel The Long Tomorrow was recently issued in a new edition by the Library of America. For that matter, Jerome Bixby's writing career was also starting to pick up speed in the early '50s, when he would write and see published his most famous story, "It's a Good Life"...perhaps, like Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" or Lyn Venable's "Time Enough at Last", one of those sf magazine stories much better known for their Twilight Zone adaptations (and The Simpsons parody riffs) than in their original form. Bixby had some Hollywood work as well, including the original treatment for the 1960s film hit Fantastic Voyage.
Planet Comics #38 (1945) art: Joe Doolin


 Major comics icons such as Will Eisner and Jack Kirby had important career turning points with the Fiction House graphic line, and the art on both sides of the product line were improving throughout the '40s and into the '50s...the garishness of some of the early Planet covers helped turn off some perhaps overly serious fans, who were embarrassed enough by the small-print "Astounding" over the large-lettered SCIENCE FICTION on that more subtly covered magazine. Nonetheless, the elegance of the exotic art on Planet Stories certainly improved at the turn of the 1950s (as see above), and no one had a good reason to take a snobbish attitude toward the magazine for its last six years or so, before being one of if not the last Fiction House title to fold in the wake of distribution troubles, comics censorship and loss of audience, and the general slumping sales and retail exposure given the pulps in the mid-1950s onward. 
Cover by Allen Anderson



 Under Bixby, the magazine went from quarterly to bimonthly publication with the issue out at about the same time as the first Galaxy.

 To read this issue online at Archive.org
Contents:
Cover by Allen Anderson
Also launching just after the Galaxy debut, the worst-titled sf magazine (at least among the fully professional ones) was launched as a reprint title, with also a rather awkward cover format. You know a writer of Bixby's skill could've come up with a better title for the magazine, which was presumably forced upon the 'zine by the publishing brass 
(they published other Two Complete...Books titles, but no others with such a sad attempt at a new label for their content). Note also the first issue's rather interesting mix of still-reasonably-famous writers, both remembered today in some part for their religious work...the atheist Asimov for his presidency and staunch support of the American Humanist Association, Hubbard, of course, for the Church of Scientology...Dianetics, its core, had such a vogue in sf circles that even the skeptical Christian James Blish writes an article about it (which involves Bixby) and sees it published in Planet (see above).
Contents:

 Standard Magazines/Better Publications, Inc.; 
Sam Merwin, Jr., editor
And the last of our magazines from the US newsstand set in the last months of 1950 are the Thrilling group sf magazines, stablemates over the years of such titles as Thrilling Mystery and Thrilling Adventure; Standard bought Hugo Gernsback's second major sf magazine, Wonder Stories, and augmented its title slightly in 1936; the first editor after the takeover was Mort Weisinger, who, even before Ray Palmer would at Ziff-Davis's magazines, aimed TWS and its eventual companions Startling Stories and Captain Future magazines squarely at a young audience (Weisinger's fantasy magazine, Strange Stories, was slightly more adult), and in doing so had the letter columns theoretically conducted by a Colorful old space-hoot named Sergeant Saturn, who had an irritating alien companion he called WartEars. Weisinger left the magazine to become the editor at Superman and other National Periodicals comics in 1941, and the less acute Oscar J. Friend continued most of the bad policies at the magazines (Strange was folded with Weisinger's departure; the Captain would lose his own magazine as Friend was about to leave, in 1944). But in 1945, Sam Merwin
1952 Bergey cover, a mix of "GGA"(Good Girl Art)
and the tragic for the first monthly issue.
was placed at the editor's desk, and announced an immediate desire to make his magazines better, including getting rid of  "Sarge" and starting to publish as much rather sophisticated sf as he could gather, trying to lean toward adventure fiction but not to the same degree as Planet (though TWS and Startling would also run a number of stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Margaret St. Clair, Leigh Brackett, Eric Frank Russell, Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner and Frederic Brown that pulled in other directions), and Astounding-style technologically rigorous work was welcome (from the likes of Clarke, James Blish or Charles Harness), but it wouldn't be the hallmark of the magazine, either.  Sadly, perhaps, the Captain Future novellas were retained for inclusion in Startling Stories (not the best work Edmond Hamilton or, sometimes, Manly Wade Wellman among others were doing, but who better?), but the magazines did markedly improve. The packaging was often still similar to what it had been earlier, including covers by Earle K. Bergey much loved by at least a few vocal readers of this blog (and its writer, and not without reason), but the fiction was much more engaging and diverse. Merlin's 1952 successor, Samuel Mines, got to reap even more reward with this, as his version of Startling became briefly the bestselling magazine in the field...and Startling absorbed its stablemates for the last few issues in 1955. Merwin would go onto assistant editing at Galaxy (as did Jerome Bixby), editing early issues of Fantastic Universe, and eventually editing Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

Thrilling Wonder Stories had perhaps the best lineup for the late 1950 issue, if perhaps also the worst of a bad set of cover illustrations:
Contents:
But it's certainly close...Jack Vance head to head with John D. MacDonald and Eric Frank Russell...and the letter column is full of fans who would go on to write and edit in field when they weren't doing so already...
Cover by Earle Bergey
Contents:

 And the Thrilling Group added their own reprint magazines to the mix, beginning in early 1950, with a new story or two in each issue of Fantastic Story Quarterly (with one by Merwin and one by "William Morrison" in this issue):
Contents:
And, reviving an old Gernsback tradition, Wonder Story Annual was introduced, as an all-reprint magazine, in mid 1950:
Contents:

And, so, thanks for all the kind notes, folks...no more of this particular project to come, for now, but even a cursory glance over this blog will suggest this kind of post happens rather frequently...

And thanks for all the fine work done by the folks at ISFDB and Galactic Central, from which most of the images and all the indices have been borrowed. Thanks to ComicVine for information on and image of Planet Comics.

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Friday, July 24, 2015

FFM: ca. October 1950: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, AMAZING STORIES, IMAGINATION, OTHER WORLDS: the US newsstand peers of the new GALAXY, Part 4 of 5

Cover by Frank Kelly Freas

 Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 5/conclusion
This is the fourth in a series of quick looks at the newsstand magazines devoted to fantasy and science fiction, published in the US, which shared retail space and artistic community with the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which became almost inarguably the most influential and was inarguably the best-selling sf magazine for a period of a year or sos in the early 1950s...though the conventional wisdom, that it was in its own league (or in a league composed only of three elite magazines) when compared to the often impressive existing magazines, and a few (mostly revived) to appear along with it, is, I'd say, unwarranted...1950 was a very good year for the rather large number of such fiction magazines in the US alone, with even the weakest titles having something worth reading about them, and the commercial success of Galaxy (and Startling Stories, and some others)
Cover by Bill Wayne
was often well-deserved...it's probably a pity it inspired such a larger glut of several less-distinguished, and several short-lived excellent, competitors by the mid '50s...a pity in the latter case only in that they were short-lived and helped create a glut that exceeded the available audience market...though the writers at the time were certainly happy to have the markets...

 And all that said, this installment, once we're past Weird Tales, is probably the weakest set of the magazines we'll deal with, as editor Howard Browne had been part of editor and now publisher Raymond A. Palmer's fiction-factory approach to the Ziff-Davis magazines, an approach Palmer carried over to his new Clark Publications magazines...while continuing, much like John W. Campbell, to pursue some paranormal interests beyond sf or fantasy (Browne, for his part, often found it hard to care when his magazines were not budgeted to do much more than continue the bad old methods, and like his old boss Palmer and his assistant Hamling before him, Browne would leave ZD, in his case for Hollywood, in the mid 1950s).

 Weird Tales, Inc.; Dorothy McIlwraith, editor
Weird Tales, founded in 1923, is the oldest of the magazines we consider in this series (and the one, at least till the founding of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, probably the most respected in at least the more adventurous corners of the larger literary world) and the first US magazine, at very least, to be established with an only-fantasy-fiction remit (with an obvious emphasis on horror). The second editor, Farnsworth Wright, had been separated from the magazine for health reasons by early 1940, and his approach to the magazine, very Gothic and devoted to, or at least very tolerant of, the most discursive sort of prose, had drawn a devoted audience, and fostered the careers of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, Manly Wade Wellman,  Frank Belknap Long and Seabury Quinn, and drawn contributions from writers such as August Derleth, H. Russell Wakefield and Algernon Blackwood who had established themselves elsewhere and sometimes in utterly different modes; as did Long (and, in many ways, Lovecraft), Edmond Hamilton wrote a fair amount of "weird-scientific" science fiction and science-fantasy for the magazine (and they would be joined in that by the young C[atherine]. L. Moore). Meanwhile, (sometimes only slightly) younger writers, some of them corresponding friends with Lovecraft and the other members of his Circle, such as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, Ray Bradbury, Alison V. Harding, Theodore Sturgeon, Margaret St. Clair and Joseph Payne Brennan, often got their eldritch start writing for Wright's WT, with others first contributing to McIlwraith's version of the magazine; but most of the second group (and some of the veterans, such as Wellman) really found their own voices in pages of the more consciously modern magazine under the new regime. McIlwraith was simultaneously editing Short Stories, the general interest pulp slanted toward men (so her editorial credit there was as "D. McIlwraith").

 Since there was no October issue (a strange bit of scheduling for such a magazine), I'm cheating by featuring two issues, the September with the even more impressive set of contributors than the November, which in its turn is led off by Fritz Leiber's important early story "The Dead Man"...and has a better cover painting.
Contents:
September:

November:
(Calvin Thos. Beck, letter-writer cited above, would become most famous in his own right as editor and publisher of Castle of Frankenstein, a fairly sophisticated if utterly fannish magazine about horror film and related matter, but would become even more famous backhandedly, as the model, in his physical appearance and in his relation with his utterly unpleasant and domineering mother, for Robert Bloch's character Norman Bates, in the novel Psycho.)

Cover by Robert Gibson Jones

Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.; 
editor: Howard Browne 
(assistant editor: 
William Hamling)
Fantastic Adventures, and its stablemate, the oldest theoretically all-sf magazine, Amazing Stories, had been going through quite a lively, jarring time at the turn of the 1950s. Ray Palmer, who had been editor of Amazing since it was purchased by Ziff-Davis in 1938 and founding editor of FA in 1939, had a love for sf and fantasy, but also an itch to challenge authority and otherwise prove he could do nearly anything he set out to do (perhaps in part due to an early accident that left him a very short, hunchbacked man at maturity); he'd taken his mostly adventure-oriented, youth-slanted magazines to the next level in sales by publishing a series of the supposed revelations of aliens among us, Deros who lived in the (hollow) Earth under the surface and tried to control us (the times were ripe for control conspiracies, as I suppose they always are), as somewhat rewritten from submissions by one Richard Shaver; the "Shaver Mystery" had particularly annoyed staffer Howard Browne, primarily a mystery writer but also fond of fantasy fiction, not so much of such "fringe" paranoia. Thus, when Palmer left, in 1949, to devote his time to his own magazine company (founded while still working for Ziff-Davis, Palmer's ownership hidden by pseudonyms), Browne was kicked "upstairs" to the editorial desk--and. ZD in 1950 toyed with the notion of a bigger-budgeted, more sophisticated "slick" magazine version of Amazing, but little came of that; Browne had begun buying some rather better material for the project, but instead it was parceled out in FA and Amazing issues, along with typical "filler" stories and even more trivial short articles in the magazines, business as usual...except, and particularly in what FA published in 1950, there was a fair amount of good to brilliant material. Even with a sequel to L. Ron Hubbard's well-received fantasy Slaves of Sleep and a contribution from the young Mack Reynolds, the October issue was one of the weaker in a year that had seen the magazine offer, in previous months, The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon, You're All Alone by Fritz Leiber, "The Devil with You!" and "The Girl from Mars" by Robert Bloch, Reynolds's "Isolationist" and, in the September issue, Leiber's impressive "The Ship Sails at Midnight" and good stories by August Derleth, "William Tenn" and Lester Del Rey.  And even the staff writers on the magazine, usually churning out the more ephemeral pulp stories, included at times Bloch and such other talented writers as William P. McGivern and Rog Phillips (who both also contributed some more ambitious stories) and Browne himself; Walt Sheldon and Clifford Simak had stories in these issues that rose above the level of most items published under such "house names" as "Alexander Blade". Charles Myers offered Thorne Smith-lite fantasy in his "Toffee" stories, to FA and several other magazines in the 1950s. 
Contents:
Cover by Robert Gibson Jones
Browne never did like science fiction as well as fantasy, and didn't attempt to hide that fact; he was very vocal about how much he liked the work of Theodore Sturgeon, among a few others, but Sturgeon, like most of his contributors, wrote in both modes with aplomb (if Sturgeon usually better than most others). Browne's Amazing was rarely as impressive as his Fantastic Adventures, when he was trying at all, and when Ziff-Davis finally decided to try a semi-slick, well-budgeted Fantastic in 1953, Browne was almost as happy as if they'd let him revive one of the crime-fiction titles ZD had published in the latter '40s, or start a new one. Amazing in 1950, and in this issue, nonetheless did have several stories from Fredric Brown, Clifford Simak, Rog Phillips, Mack Reynolds and other notable writers.
Contents:
Cover by Hannes Bok
Clark Publishing Co.; 
Raymond J. Palmer, editor

 Imagination also launched with its October 1950 issue, with a gorgeous Hannes Bok cover (one of his best, in a too-short, brilliant career), if perhaps in more of a Maxfield Parrish mode than usual for Bok. The fiction content of the first issue is less well-known, and I've not yet read anything from this issue, so don't know if the often very good Kris Neville's story rises above the typical Ziff-Davis competent hackery that seems to dominate this table of contents, or if among the relatively few stories Willard Hawkins contributed to the fantastic-fiction magazines over the decades, this one is in any way notable.  There is some question as to whether this magazine was published briefly by Palmer solely as a favor to William Hamling, who might've been the real editor and publisher but not quite yet ready to leave his job at Ziff-Davis, as Palmer had the year before after a stealth campaign in founding Clark Publishing and introducing his magazine Other Worlds, and the rather more enduring "nonfiction" title, Fate magazine. In any case, Palmer formally turned "Madge" over to  Hamling in 1951, who published it for several years before getting much more focused on the rather sophisticated Playboy imitator Rogue and from there, as the '60s progressed, onto more-explicit pornography publishing.
Contents:
Cover by Malcolm Smith

Other Worlds, on the other hand, was definitely Ray Palmer's magazine. The fiction wasn't too likely to impress the reader too much from issue to issue but the personality behind the editorials and blurbs was all RAP, as Palmer often signed himself, and it's notable how much of this issue was written by Rog Phillips (with apparently minor Fredric Brown and Randall Garrett stories among the others). Palmer had a partner in publishing Fate magazine, and eventually took on a partner in editing OW, Bea Mahaffey. After a couple of years, Other Worlds was actually "split" into two magazines, with a general understanding that perhaps Universe Science Fiction (going Galaxy one better) was mostly Mahaffey's project, and Science Stories (again with some impressive Bok cover illustration) was more Palmer's, but I have no idea to what degree that's accurate. It is well-known that probably the most important story Universe published, in its first issue under that title, was Theodore Sturgeon's "The World Well Lost," which is the first story in newsstand sf magazines to present a positive portrayal of a homosexual couple (of aliens in this case) and make the case against homophobic discrimination.  Eventually, the two titles were reincorporated into one, and a year or so after Palmer sold his interest in Fate, he changed the title of Other Worlds to Flying Saucers from Other Worlds and continued that title as a "non-fiction" UFOlogy title for some years. 
Contents:
Concluding installment tomorrow, if the crick don't rise...dealing with some of the best magazines in the field, though unfortunately for them pulp magazines and thus doomed to fold in 1955 as that form of publishing was dying: Planet Stories, Startling Stories and their stablemates.

Images and indices from ISFDB and Galactic Central. 

 For more of today's more typical Friday Books entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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