Introduction

In 1954, John Spencer & Co closed down their four juvenile-oriented SF magazines (FSS, TOT, WOFA, WSP) and, for the next thirteen years, their efforts in the SF-Fantasy-weird fiction field appeared almost exclusively under the "Badger" imprint in two main series

• Badger Science Fiction, a series of SF novels that ran for 118 issues, but which is not therefore a magazine and does not appear in Visco
• Supernatural Stories (SNS), which ran for 108 issues (numbered 1-109, but 108 is thought never to have been published)

Some authorities do not consider SNS to be a magazine, either. About a third of the issues contained a single, novel-length story, and some others were written entirely or mostly by one of the house authors under various pseudonyms. Nevertheless, it is enough like a magazine to be included here.

SNS issues bear one of three titles. The bulk of them (67 of 108) are simply called "Supernatural Stories". However:

#29, 32, 35, 40 and then every even-numbered issue to 106 were labeled a "Supernatural Special". They contained a single novel-length story, the title of which was featured prominently on the cover and spine. There were 37 of these.

#13, 15, 17, 19 were labeled "Out of This World", continuing a title that had appeared in a short-lived Spencer magazine in 1954-55 (see OUT)

The dominant figure in the pages of SNS was R Lionel Fanthorpe, the most famously prolific British author of the period. He wrote 34 of the 37 "Supernatural Specials" and all of the stories in many of the magazine issues as well, under his own name or various pseudonyms (usually partial anagrams of "Robert Lionel Fanthorpe"), occasionally also using house names such as John E Muller. Over the same period, he was writing the vast majority of the Badger SF series. Fanthorpe tells many entertaining stories of churning out an entire, 50,000-word novel in a week for the princely sum of £25. It seems that the number of words was more crucial than their quality, which accounts for some of the more remarkable flights of purple prose in the Fanthorpe canon. He has a fan site dedicated to him at www.peltorro.com where the covers of many more of his books can be seen

I have seen it claimed that Fanthorpe was almost entirely responsible for SNS. This is not quite true; many of the early numbers, and a few of the later ones, were written by John S Glasby, likewise using various pseudonyms and house names. He also wrote the remaining three "Supernatural Specials". I did not realise until I scanned the contents listings in SFFWF that one issue (#9) was wholly written, again pseudonymously, by E.C.Tubb.

By #10, SNS was claiming on its front cover to be bi-monthly and then, from #38, monthly. This continued on the odd-numbered magazine issues until #77, was dropped from #79, then reappeared on #91 to 105, and became bi-monthly again on #107 and 109. The actual publication schedule was much less regular than this implies as you can tell from the dates on the thumbnail pages, which were taken from SFFWF, as were the artist attributions. Two thirds of the covers in all, and every one from #68 onwards, were painted by H Fox, an artist about whom I know very little and whose work appears on no other SF magazine.

Sources of Images

All of the images in this series were provided either by Phil Stephensen-Payne or by Alistair Durie, to whom many thanks. Only #45 is missing; please contact me if you can provide it.