Strange Adventures on Other Worlds
Curator’s Note
By the late 1930s, science fiction was changing. Stories increasingly explored scientific extrapolation and social ideas alongside the sense of wonder that had defined the field’s earliest years. Not every reader welcomed the change. Many fans still wanted the old-fashioned science fiction adventure of fantastic worlds, strange planets, and interplanetary journeys.
Fiction House, recently returned to the pulp market after a Depression-era hiatus, saw an opportunity. In October 1939, the company launched Planet Stories, devoted to this tradition of imaginative space adventure. Fiction House was also entering the rapidly developing comic-book market, following Planet Stories with Planet Comics, released in November 1939 with a January 1940 cover date. The comic-book industry itself was still in its formative years. The conventions, formats, audiences, and publishing practices that would later define the industry were still being developed, making this an era of considerable experimentation.
Together, the two publications reveal something about how closely Fiction House watched its potential audiences. Planet Stories appealed to readers who wanted the traditional space-adventure story, while Planet Comics offered that same sense of adventure in a visual medium increasingly popular with young readers. Although its presumed audience was boys and young men, Planet Comics also attracted girls, and its pages featured recurring female heroes as well as stories drawn by women artists. These were not necessarily expressions of a deliberate social agenda; they were also evidence of a publisher recognizing opportunities within its market.
Planet Stories appeared quarterly for most of its 71-issue run, from 1939 through 1955. Its longtime editor, Malcolm Reiss, emphasized interplanetary adventure, exotic alien worlds, and escapism rather than scientific prediction or social commentary. Yet the magazine was hardly isolated from the broader science-fiction field. Its pages featured work by many of the genre’s important writers. See A Who’s Who of SF Writers below.
The magazine’s visual identity became equally iconic. Artists including Frank R. Paul, Alexander Leydenfrost, Allen Anderson, and Kelly Freas created visions of alien worlds, heroic explorers, fantastic machinery, and danger on distant planets. See Iconic Imagery below.
And then there was The Vizigraph, the magazine’s legendary letter column. It became an international forum where fans discussed, criticized, and debated science fiction, continuing the tradition of fandom fostered by Hugo Gernsback’s early Amazing Stories. See The Vizigraph below.
Planet Stories preserved a particular vision of the future: one filled with strange worlds, dangerous journeys, and seemingly limitless possibilities. Welcome to that universe.
The Universe of Future Centuries — Planet Stories Covers
Planet Stories’ covers—produced by illustrative luminaries such as Allen Anderson, Frank R. Paul, Jerome Rozen, Hannes Bok, Virgil Finlay, and Kelly Freas — created a solid platform for fan’s daydreams. Its distinctive lurid covers set Planet Stories apart from its sister pulps.
The writers appearing in Planet Stories formed a who’s who of the science fiction field at the time. Here is a complete list of the writers and how many stories they contributed throughout the magazine’s entire run.
- Leigh Brackett—19
- Ray Bradbury—18
- Ross Rocklynne —18
- Bryce Walton—14
- Nelson S. Bond—13
- Poul Anderson—13
- Alfred Coppel Jr.—12
- Henry Hasse—12
- Ray Cummings—10
- Raymond Z. Gallum—8
- Wilbur S. Peacock—7
- Gardner F. Fox—5
- Henry Kuttner—5
- Margaret St. Clair—5
- Philip K. Dick—5
- Frank Belknap Long—4
- Fredrick A. Kummer Jr.—4
- Fredric Brown—4
- Neil R. Jones—4
- Clifford D. Simak—3
- Eando Binder—3
- John Jakes—3
- Noel Loomis—3
- Richard Wilson—3
- Damon Knight—2
- H B Fyfe—2
- Harry Walton—2
- J. Harvey Haggard—2
- John Russell Fearn—2
- Manley Wade Wellman—2
- Raymond F. Jones—2
- Robert Sheckley—2
- Sam Moskowitz—2
- A. Bertram Chandler—1
- A. E. Van Voight—1
- A. M. Phillips—1
- Alfred Coppell Jr—1
- Bob Tucker—1
- Donald Wolheim—1
- Ed Earl Repp—1
- Erik Flint Russell—1
- Gordon R. Dickson—1
- H. L. Gold—1
- Hannes Bock—1
- Henry Andrew Ackerman—1
- Isaac Asimov—1
- Jack Vance—1
- James Blish—1
- Laurence Manning—1
- Leigh Brackett & Ray Bradbury—1
- Otis A. Kline—1
- Theodore Sturgeon—1
The Vizigraph
“Martians, Venusians, Saturnians, Neptunians and Brooklynians—you’re invited, all of you, to vizigraph in your message. Kicks, kudos, bombs and bouquets—our expert operator can take it. All PS asks is that you make your vizigrams helpful and interesting.” —Planet Stories, Vol. 1 No. 2, Spring 1940.
The Vizigraph letters column helped Planet Stories develop a strong community of fans of all ages and walks of life. Among them were writers, editors, artists, and young fans such as Chad Oliver and Milton Lesser, who would later become noted science fiction writers. The Vizigraph was so popular that some claimed to buy the magazine only for its letters. Historically, it has become a time capsule; an antique piece of social media, the Twitter of its day.
Planet Comics
Planet Comics was a companion to Fiction House’s pulp magazine Planet Stories, but it quickly developed an identity of its own. The first issue appeared with a January 1940 cover date, and the series continued for 73 issues through Winter 1953.
At first glance, Planet Comics offered exactly what its presumed audience—boys and young men—might have wanted: colorful interstellar adventures, beautiful spacewomen, monstrous aliens, heroic spacemen, fantastic worlds, and fast-moving stories filled with danger. Its covers frequently presented the familiar pulp tableau of a scantily clad heroine threatened by some fearsome creature while a heroic spaceman raced to her rescue.
But Planet Comics was not always so predictable.
Alongside the endangered heroines were women who took action themselves. Characters such as Gale Allen, Futura, and especially Mysta of the Moon were recurring heroes of their own adventures. Mysta, leader of an advanced lunar civilization, occupied a role not unlike that of the heroic male space adventurers appearing elsewhere in science fiction of the period. The comic did not simply place women in the background; it sometimes made them the protagonists.
Even more unusually, several of these female-centered stories were drawn by women artists. Fiction House employed artists including Lily Renée, Marcia Snyder, Ruth Atkinson, and Fran Hopper, whose work helped create the visual world of Planet Comics. The presence of women was therefore not confined to the characters appearing on the page.
Nor was the audience necessarily as exclusively male as publishers might have assumed. Although Planet Comics was marketed primarily toward boys and young men, letters to the comic demonstrate that girls were reading it as well. The evidence is a small but revealing reminder that the audience for science fiction was already more varied than its presumed market.
This makes Planet Comics an intriguing example of how pulp publishers watched their readers. Fiction House was selling an intensely masculine fantasy of space adventure, yet within that market it was also making room for female characters, female creators, and female readers. This was not a modern feminist project. Rather, it reflects a publisher recognizing that girls and women could be part of the market for fantastic fiction—and creating material that gave them reasons to keep reading.
The visual style of the series was equally characteristic of its era. Early covers were drawn by Will Eisner; later covers were produced largely by Dan Zolnerowich (later Dan Zolne) and Joe Doolin. Together they helped establish the flamboyant, theatrical appearance that has made Planet Comics so recognizable to collectors today.
Planet Comics is remembered for its lurid covers and spectacular adventures, but its treatment of audience and creators offers another reason to look more closely. Beneath the familiar imagery of monsters, spaceships, and endangered spacewomen is evidence of a publishing industry paying close attention to who was actually buying—and reading—its stories.
Iconic Imagery: Planet Stories referenced in later media
Examples of how the iconic art seen on the covers of Planet Stories was later reused.
The cover of the January 1942 issue of Planet Stories with art by Alexander Leydenfrost (left). Art reused for the cover of Tops in Science Fiction Spring 1953 issue (right).
The cover of the March 1951 issue of Planet Stories with art by Allen Anderson (left). Stills from the opening credits of the film, Earth Girls are Easy (1988) (right).
Another Vision of the Future
Planet Stories offered one vision of science fiction: exotic worlds, heroic adventure, and the boundless pleasures of space opera. Across the pulp landscape, Astounding Stories offered a different emphasis, increasingly concerned with science, ideas, prediction, and the possibilities of the future itself.
The two magazines represent different traditions within science fiction, but both remain part of the genre’s living history. As the world changes, so does science fiction. Yet there will always be readers who look back to earlier stories—not simply with nostalgia, but with curiosity. They collect them, study them, argue about them, and sometimes find in them new ways of thinking about the world around us.
If Planet Stories is your kind of science fiction, step next door into the Astounding Hall and explore another corner of that history.
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