John W. Campbell art director?

         I READ SOMETHING SURPRISINGin issue #32 of Illustration, a magazine about which I’ve long been curious but had never before picked up—probably due to its $15.00 an issue price tag. Anyhow for some reason, I finally broke down a sprang for a copy, and inside there was a short piece about Robert Adranga, who apparently did a lot of well-received covers for a Hitchcock YA mysteries series called The Three Investigators. I remembered Adranga’s name because he did a cover for Fantastic back in the sixties that I loved (I still have the issue, and the cover was also reproduced in the article.) It turns out that the Fantastic cover was Adranga’s first sale, made while he was yet in art school. The interviewer asked him about it, and it was Adranga’s answer which surprised me. Here’s what he said:

            “I took my portfolio to those two…