Science Fiction was only one of many genres found in The Skipper. The Boys’ Paper from England featured the usual line-up of cowboys, detectives, military and sports heroes, comedic “School Stories” (where the headmaster was either the best man in the world or a jolly rotter) and other assorted tales like chimpanzee sheriffs and jungle boys. Among all these exciting stories were the few true SF ones featuring robots, giant spiders and trips to the moon.
It is not too hard to guess where the inspiration for these 1930s magazine stories came from. John Wyndham tells how he bought copies of American Pulp magazines at Woolworths for pennies. The magazines were used as ballast on ships then sold off cheap. You couldn’t be sure if you would get every issue (or ones with covers) but the stories published by Hugo Gernsback and later T. O’Connor Sloane, made an impact on British SF fans and later writers.
Sadly, The Skipper didn’t believe in by-lines or art credits so I can’t offer much there. These unknown writers and artists worked on a weekly schedule, writing stories in six issues installments with the same topper each time but with one new illustration for that story. The character usually appeared on the color cover of the first installment.
Conclusion
As a reflection of early 1930s Pulp magazines, it would not be fair to expect Science Fiction in The Skipper to be innovative. We see the giant insects, dinosaurs, robot servants, super machines and later proto-superheroes as World War II progresses. The presence of H. G. Wells looms over these ideas already forty plus years old. The much more recent images of Edmond Hamilton also come to mind. The inventiveness here is not a new SF idea but how the writers and artists used the standard ideas to entertain young men, all bound to become future Science Fiction fans. John Wyndham, under his real name of John Beynon Harris, was one of those who sold his early SF to Gernsback and Sloane, paying back for the excitement and futurism of the 1920s Pulps.
