Fantastic (magazine)

Fantastic was a fantastic fiction magazine. Begun in 1952 by editor Howard Browne and publishers Ziff Davis (Z-D) as an attempt at a sophisticated and handsome digest-sized magazine, Fantastic was initially a success, and became even more so by its third issue, which featured a story attributed to the enormously popular crime fiction writer Mickey Spillane. The story was actually written by Browne, a crime-fiction writer and editor who had been editing the pulp magazines line Z-D published at that time, including Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and the recently-folded Mammoth Detective, among others; apparently Spillane had told a version of the story he'd previously sold to Fantastic to a reporter from the enormously popular Life Magazine, where it appeared ahead of the Z-D magazine's publication, leaving Browne unwilling to run the actual Spillane text.

Title changes and title confusions

A number of other magazines unrelated to the Z-D/Ultimate Fantastic have been published over the decades with the word "Fantastic" in their titles. In addition, Fantastic has had several titles on its own cover. Variant titles of Fantastic include

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• Fantastic
• Fantastic Science Fiction
• Fantastic Science Fiction Stories
• Fantastic Stories Of Imagination
• Fantastic: Science Fiction – Fantasy
• Fantastic Stories

The title most likely to be confused is Fantastic Adventures, since that shared the same publishers and overlapped for some months. Other unrelated Science Fiction magazines include

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• Fantastic Novels
• Famous Fantastic Mysteries
• Fantastic Science Fiction (two unrelated pulp-sized issues in 1952)
• Fantastic Story Magazine (a companion to Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1950-1955).
• Fantastic Story Quarterly
• Fantastic Universe (1953-1960)