Street & Smith's New York Weekly

This penny weekly serialized Bantam Jim and Dante Dick, stories of urban adventure and crime that typified Victorian sensation fiction for working-class readers. The woodcut illustrations—a shipwreck scene and a desperate mountain chase—promise melodrama and danger in installments costing mere pennies. Such serials, published weekly by the thousands, fed an appetite for plot-driven narrative that preceded comic books by decades, establishing the formula of recurring characters, cliffhangers, and visual storytelling that would define sequential art. These publications reached audiences excluded from more expensive literature, making them precursors to comics' own democratic reach.