Introduction

I have grouped together here these five magazines:

They are all from the same publisher, John Spencer, publishers of the Badger imprint and of Supernatural Stories (which is listed under SNS on a separate page.) They are almost identical in format and general presentation and they run concurrently over the same period, from 1950 to 1954. The backs of many issues carried advertisements for forthcoming numbers of one of the other titles, encouraging one to think that they were all part of a linked series. The magazines shared a pool of writers and artists, few of whom appeared much outside the Spencer publications, much of the fiction being written under pseudonyms. All five titles were aimed at a juvenile market and none of the fiction was of any great standard.

There is no credit given to the cover artist in any of the copies that I own, and my information comes from SFFWF. All five titles are indexed there. The dates given in SFFWF, however, differ somewhat from those given in Tuck and in Stone's Index to the British Science Fiction Magazines (IBSFM) and I have used the latter. In summary:

• FSS ran for 16 issues from August 1950 to June 1954 (but see below)
• OUT ran for two issues in late 1954
• TOT ran for 11 issues from September 1950 to June 1954
• WOFA ran for 14 issues from June 1950 to June 1954
• WSP ran for 10 issues from November 1950 to April 1954

Leaving aside OUT, the dates of the first issues suggests a plan to produce the titles in some sort of rotating sequence but, if there ever was such a plan, it soon broke down and the publication schedule of all of them became highly irregular. Only three issues of all of the titles together appeared in 1951, and there was a gap between February and December of that year when none of them appeared at all. All came to an end at about the same time, and Spencer's energies were diverted into other areas. OUT alone had a kind of continued existence - the title was re-used on four issues of the "Supernatural Stories" series, #13, 15, 17 and 19. Further, these two OUT issues were entirely reprinted, with one extra story in each case, as SNS #34 and 36.

Source of Images

About half of the images shown are scanned from copies in my own collection and one or two were copies offered for sale on eBay. The rest were kindly provided by Phil Stephensen-Payne and Alistair Durie.

Please contact me if you are able to provide a scan of the missing TOT 10.