Mystery Magazine, Vol. I, No. 18

A red sphinx figurine sits at the center of this cover, surrounded by reaching hands rendered in stark black ink. The composition suggests urgency and danger—multiple figures converging on a mysterious object. "The Bird Headed Sphinx: A Story of Detective Work" by Edith Sessions Tupper promises sensational crime fiction within.

By 1918, magazines like Mystery inherited the tradition of Victorian penny dreadfuls—cheap serialized fiction that had captivated working-class readers since the 1830s with lurid tales of crime, murder, and the supernatural. Where earlier penny bloods offered serialized melodramas in installments, twentieth-century pulp magazines sustained the appetite for sensation through accessible prose and eye-catching cover art. These publications established conventions—the detective protagonist, the impossible puzzle, the menacing visual—that would profoundly shape the emerging comic book form.