Introduction

There were two series of British reprints of Fantastic Adventures

• FAD1 - two issues, Ziff-Davis, London, 1946
• FAD2 - 24 pulp-sized issues, Thorpe & Porter, Leicester 1950-54

Fantastic Adventures closely parallels its Ziff-Davis companion magazine "Amazing", therefore. Unlike "Amazing", however, there was no digest-sized edition that followed on from the pulps. The US Fantastic Adventures folded after the March 1953 issue and SFFWF says that it was combined with the new Ziff-Davis digest title "Fantastic" after this. There was a short-lived British edition of Fantastic which, however, overlapped with FAD2 so you could not say it was a direct successor. For convenience, however, I have included here

• FAN1 - eight issues, published by Strato Publications and distributed by Thorpe & Porter 1953-55

FAD1 - Fantastic Adventures First Series

There were two issues in this series published by Ziff Davis, presumably the UK branch of the company that was publishing the US original at this time. #1 carried the front cover and the lead story from the US July 1946 issue, as well as the Frank Paul back cover from the same date. #2 had the cover and lead story from US June 1942 and it, too carried a Frank Paul back cover, but this one from the original US issue from December 1945. These two issues were only 32 pages in length and the remaining stories they contained were drawn from various earlier numbers from the 1942-45 period. SFFWF gives 1947 as the date for these, but IBSFM dates them as July and September 1946, which are the dates I have used here.

FAD2 - Fantastic Adventures Second Series

Like Amazing, SFFWF indexes only the first series of FAD and one assumes they thought that the second series corresponded closely with the US original. Tuck says, in fact, that they were identical to the source issue from #1 to #12 and that "one or two stories were omitted from each issue from #13". Unfortunately, this is a considerable oversimplification. #1 to 3 seem to be identical, barring the inside and back cover advertising. #4 has all the stories but lacks many of the non-fiction fillers of the original, as one can tell from the page counts (note that the page counts are on the British method, not counting the outer covers, while the usual US practice was to include the covers and to start numbering as if the front cover were Page 1). #6 is 32 pages short of its US parent and lacks at least one story and several fillers, then #7 is identical again. #9 is 32 pages short again, so could not have been identical, while #10, which could have been, wasn't: it dropped several of the non-fiction fillers and included an extra story from the February 1950 issue. From then on, the stories were not necessarily all from the same source issue. Both BREs are fully indexed in IBSFM, if you want to delve more deeply into it.

As far as the artwork is concerned, it looks as if the originals have been used, overprinted with a British price box. I do not have any issue where I can lay the US and British covers side by side and compare them in detail, but the British covers look identical to the best scans I have of the corresponding US magazine and I can see no evidence that any have been repainted by local artists. All but one of the back covers carry advertising, but by 1950 the US magazine only had advertising on the back anyway. The one exception is #4, where some story text has been continued onto the back cover.

Like its sister magazine Amazing, the second series was published approximately bi-monthly, but with some stretches of monthly and occasional longer gaps. Like Amazing also, the British magzines carried no dates and those given in the table below are those attributed by IBSFM. No numbers were shown until #3.

FAN1 - Fantastic

The digest-sized Fantastic had been launched by Ziff-Davis in Summer 1952 and was followed by a British edition from December 1953 onwards, unfortunately too late to reprint some of the dramatic early covers, including some of the earliest examples of wraparound covers on a science-fiction magazine. The first few of the reprinted numbers had a small illustration on a largely plain cover, but a "proper" cover reappeared from v1#5 onwards. This British edition only lasted eight issues and there was never another, although the US Fantastic lasted until 1980 before it was re-absorbed into Amazing. All of the BREs had 128 pages excluding covers, the same as the US original. It seems that the BRE carried essentially all of the original contents, though some disparities in page numbering suggest that they weren't precisely identical. So far as I can tell, the original artwork has been used, with only a UK price and date overprint; to be precise, the original US date has been overprinted with a volume and serial number and there is no UK date given. I have again relied on IBSFM for the dates shown below.

Source of Images

The majority of the images from all three series were scanned from copies in my own collection. #11 of the second series was kindly contributed by Dave Wood, and others were from magazines offered for sale on eBay.

Images Wanted

Several of the images in the second and third series are of rather poor quality - please see the wants list if you may be able to supply better ones.