After they finally let Howard Browne have his semi-slick Fantastic in 1952, to initial excellent sales...
they also finally remade Amazing in the same image the next year...
and even let Browne revive the crime-fiction magazine line:
and the adventure line, which had been short-lived in the pulp days--and no attempt to gin up a "3-Mile Limit Confidential!"...
...but the latter two saw only one issue each, and Fantastic and Amazing were soon to face reduced budgets, even as Fantastic Adventures, since 1939 Amazing's more fantasy-prone companion, was quietly merged with Fantastic
 |
UK edition with otherwise identical cover; cover story reprinted as
Black Magic Holiday |
in 1953...leading, I gather, not only to Browne's disenchantment, but eventually to the schism between B.G. Davis and William Ziff's successors at ZD...though in 1954, Ziff-Davis published two reprint issues of the London Mystery Magazine as ZD publications, and oddly crediting Browne as editor, though he had essentially nothing to do with editorial choices there...ZD presumably also aided in the limited US distribution of the magazine for some period in the 1950s...
...and Davis eventually leaving to found Davis Publications, buying Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from Mercury Press, and briefly offering (two issues only) Jack London's Adventure Magazine in 1958:
One thing I hadn't caught up with till now: Ziff-Davis's comic book line:
 |
| GI Joe loves his work...in a way Bill Mauldin's Joe would find odd... |
and...here's Wikipedia's Fantastic logotypes through the decades:
And...while it was published after Howard Browne left ZD, there was a spin-off title from wish-fulfillment fantasy issues of Fantastic that managed to run for three issues under successor Paul Fairman, in 1957:
(originally published Xmas Eve, 2015)
Night Gallery was a disappointing television series, to say the least, even given the occasional excellences in individual episodes (they had the wit to adapt Fritz Leiber stories, but never very well; oddly, they did some of the best dramatization of Lovecraft we've seen). But in one regard, it was a pretty remarkable assembly, even for its time...check the soundtrack composers list from IMDb:
