All Story Magazine, December 1913

A warrior in plumed helmet and blue cloak grips a lance beside a woman in starlit white robes, one chained wrist raised toward an alien sky — the painted cover of All-Story's Christmas issue announcing Edgar Rice Burroughs's Warlord of Mars, third installment of the Barsoom series. The cover-lines identify it as a sequel to Under the Moons of Mars and The Gods of Mars, priced at fifteen cents. Wood-pulp magazines like All-Story — named for the cheap fibrous paper that kept them affordable — were the incubators of American genre fiction. Their vivid painted covers sold sword-and-planet romance, science fiction, and adventure to mass audiences, establishing visual and narrative conventions that comic books would absorb wholesale a generation later.