
“Planet Stories” was launched at the same time as “Planet Comics” and ran for 71 issues between 1939 and 1955. It didn’t pay enough to attract the best authors to its pages on a regular basis but it did manage to attract well-known names on occasion, including Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak and Philip K. Dick. The artwork emphasized attractive women, with scantily clad damsels in distress or alien princesses on almost every cover.
Hannes Bok (1914-1964) is one of a handful of fantasy illustrators from the pulp magazine era, along with Virgil Finlay and Edd Cartier, whose work is just as popular today as it was in the 1940s. He made his professional debut in the pages of Weird Tales in late 1939, but he began dabbling in fantasy and science fiction art as early as 1930. He did considerable pulp magazine work throughout the 1940s, and was active as a book illustrator and painter in the late 1940s and early 1950s, contributing to such publishers as Arkham House, Shasta, Fantasy Press, and Gnome Press.