J. Francis McComas
American science fiction editor (1910-1978)
Jesse Francis McComas (June 9, 1911 – April 19, 1978) was an American science fiction editor. McComas wrote several stories on his own in the 1950s using both his own name and the pseudonym Webb Marlowe.
He entered publishing in 1941 as a salesman and editorial representative, spending two years in New York with Random House. He returned to California in 1944, working as the Pacific Coast editorial representative for Henry Holt and Company. For Simon & Schuster he became their Northern California sales manager and general editorial representative.
McComas and Raymond J. Healy co-edited Adventures in Time and Space (1946), one of the first major science fiction anthologies of previously published works re-printed in hardcover by a major publisher. Within a few years, he and Anthony Boucher were the founding co-editor of the influential The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He edited the magazine from its inception in 1949 as The Magazine of Fantasy. In the fall of 1954 he left the magazine as an active editor but continued in the role of advisory editor until 1962.
During the 1950s, McComas reviewed science fiction for The New York Times.
“J. Francis McComas” enters the record as american science fiction editor (1910-1978). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Francis, McComas and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5923872. VIAF identifies the subject as 114427771. The Library of Congress control number is n88655189. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1978, 1941 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “J. Francis McComas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.