The All-Story Magazine, February 1912

A man in a broad sombrero and serape leans through a rustic window frame, grinning at a second figure—also hatted, holding a thin object—visible in a picture-within-a-picture framed on the interior wall. A ceramic jug sits on the sill; flowering vines climb the post. The artist signed the lower left corner, though the signature reads as Gordon Grant or similar and cannot be confirmed with certainty. Frank A. Munsey's All-Story sold for ten cents a copy on newsstands across America, its wood-pulp pages packed with adventure, romance, and fantasy. This very issue carried the first installment of Edgar Rice Burroughs's debut novel, then titled Under the Moons of Mars—later A Princess of Mars—launching the planetary-romance tradition that science fiction and comics have drawn on ever since.