Monday, September 4, 2017

Two Documents: 1992: Robert Bloch remonstrates with Joe Lansdale and David Webb for mocking Karen Finley; FANTASTIC absorbs FANTASTIC ADVENTURES in 1953

Your horror/suspense and fantasy+ magazine artifacts for Labor Day.

Richard Chizmar shared some Cemetery Dance correspondence on FaceBook some years back. (Few spell "cemetery" correctly with consistency...I certainly have learned to look again when I type the word.)(Didn't hurt Chizmar's collaborator Stephen King any, though he might've had a point to make...)


And the house ad announcing that the semi-slick digest Fantastic would be absorbing its pulp predecessor Fantastic Adventures, marking the end of the run for an often engaging (and occasionally impressive, particularly around 1950) pulp title and no more attempt to make a sustained "prestige" magazine of Fantastic, which would go into a not-trying-too-hard slump till Cele Goldsmith, later Cele Lalli, and by the end of her career as a major editor of bridal magazines Cele Goldsmith Lalli, was given her first full-editor opportunity with Fantastic and Amazing Stories in 1959-65.

A rather typical, if star-studded, example of early FA (1941):

One of my favorite issues, 1950; the brilliant Leiber novella (apparently written for and purchased by Unknown Worlds, but in inventory when that magazine folded)  is joined by pleasant stories by Robert Bloch, William McGivern and (though slight, I remember it as not bad) June Lurie: 

Howard Browne was editing FA by 1950, having succeeded founding editor Ray Palmer; Browne was allowed to attempt a more sophisticated package with Fantastic, with one of Browne's best issues here: 

The last FA:

Fantastic's first post merger issue...though it wouldn't start running on fumes for another year, with the August 1954 issue the first predominantly devoted to yard-goods fiction...


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