It was almost cancelled at the end of 1940, but the October 1940 issue enjoyed unexpectedly good sales, helped by a strong cover by J. Allen St. John for Robert Moore Williams' Jongor of Lost Land.

McCauley, whose glamorous "MacGirl" covers were popular with the readers, though the emphasis on depictions of attractive and often partly clothed women did draw some objections.

Browne briefly managed to improve the quality of the fiction in Fantastic Adventures, and the period around 1951 has been described as the magazine's heyday.

Browne lost interest when his plan to take Amazing Stories upmarket collapsed, and the magazine fell back into predictability.

That issue carried Robert Moore Williams' Jongor of Lost Land, and had a cover by J. Allen St. John; the combination proved to be so popular that October sales were twice the August figures.

Browne preferred fantasy to science fiction, and enjoyed editing Fantastic Adventures, but when his plans for taking Amazing upmarket were derailed by the Korean War, he lost interest in both magazines for a while.

[10] Palmer's goal for Fantastic Adventures was to create a magazine that published fantasy fiction but was the literary equal of the quality magazines—the "slicks", such as The Saturday Evening Post.

[4] Although mixing science fiction with fantasy was not popular with sf fans of the era, Palmer consciously promoted the magazine as containing the best of both worlds; the slogan on the cover read "The Best in Science Fiction", but Palmer also wrote blurbs in Amazing Stories for Fantastic Adventures in which he extolled the value to a reader of getting both genres in a single magazine.

[4] However, according to Ashley the first issue was quite weak: The cover story was "The Invisible Robinhood" by Eando Binder, and other contributors included Harl Vincent, Ross Rocklynne and A. Hyatt Verrill.

Ashley comments that the story was unimpressive; it had been written as a palace intrigue set in contemporary Europe, but Burroughs had been unable to find a buyer.

[4] Bond also wrote a humorous short story called "The Amazing Invention of Wilberforce Weems", which appeared in the September 1939 issue and described the consequences of a potion that allowed the instant absorption of knowledge from any book.

Palmer encouraged his stable of writers to follow up with more whimsical ideas, and the resulting offbeat stories gave Fantastic Adventures a reputation for light-hearted and entertaining fantasy.

In the February 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures, he printed a letter in which the writer claimed to be a time-traveling scientist born in 1970, whose time machine was inspired by a story in the magazine.

[7][8] Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Dreaming Jewels appeared in February 1950, and Lester del Rey, William Tenn and Walter M. Miller all published notable material.

Reynolds became more strongly associated with Astounding Science Fiction than with the Ziff-Davis magazines, but some of the radical political themes of his later work are evident in "Isolationist".

The story describes helpful alien visitors abandoning Earth to atomic war because of the hostility of the first Earthman they encounter.

"[18] Notable stories from the post-war era include Theodore Sturgeon's "Largo" and Raymond F. Jones' "The Children's Room".

The artwork was generally of higher quality than the stories; Ashley describes Fantastic Adventures as "one of the best-illustrated magazines around".

"[8] For the first year the cover art, while dramatic, was more likely to show an action scene with a male hero than a damsel in distress, but in August 1940 H.W.

Science fiction historian Paul Carter, commenting on the change from action scenes to alluring women on the covers, suggests that "surely the war had something to do with this".

The following table shows who held which title, at which point:[8] Fantastic Adventures was initially bedsheet-sized and had a page count of 96, which increased to 144 when the publication was reduced to pulp-size in June 1940.