10 Facts About Fantastic Adventures

Fantastic Adventures was an American pulp fantasy and science fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1953 by Ziff-Davis.

Fantastic Adventures was initially published in bedsheet format, the same size as the early sf magazines such as Amazing, perhaps in order to attract fans who were nostalgic for the larger format.

Fantastic Adventures let William Hamling take responsibility for both titles, and the quality declined.

Browne's interest in fantasy led him to start a new digest-sized magazine, Fantastic Adventures, in the summer of 1952; it was an immediate success, and led Ziff-Davis to convert Amazing Stories to digest format as well.

Fantastic Adventures competition included Unknown, which had been launched just a couple of months earlier, in March 1939, and Weird Tales, which was first published in 1923; but instead of attempting to emulate either one, Fantastic Adventures focused on adventure stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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Burroughs returned to Fantastic Adventures in 1941, with a series of novelettes in his Carson of Venus series; there were four in all between March 1941 and March 1942, each with cover art by J Allen St John, and the result was a significant boost to Fantastic Adventures circulation.

The majority of the stories in Fantastic Adventures came from a small group of writers who often wrote under house names.

Science fiction art often included spaceships as phallic symbols; author and critic Brian Aldiss remarked on a Fantastic Adventures cover, from March 1949, that included a submarine as a phallic symbol instead.

Fantastic Adventures was initially bedsheet-sized and had a page count of 96, which increased to 144 when the publication was reduced to pulp-size in June 1940.

Fantastic Adventures then went on a quarterly schedule, beginning with the October 1944 issue; in October 1945 it became bimonthly again, though there was a gap between February and May 1946.