Argosy All-Story Weekly

Three soldiers in WWI-era steel helmets crowd a dim room: the foreground figure thrusts a bayonet-fixed rifle directly at the viewer while a second man lurks behind him and a third slumps at a table clutching a tin cup, a dark bottle at his elbow. The cover announces King's Khaki by Will McMorrow, identified as the author of Thundering Dawns, signaling military adventure fiction pitched at a male readership hungry for wartime drama. The red masthead — ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY, ten cents — belongs to the flagship Frank Munsey pulp, founded 1882, which by 1927 had merged with All-Story Weekly and was printing hundreds of thousands of copies weekly on cheap wood-pulp paper. These painted covers and the serialized fiction beneath them forged the template — tight plotting, genre atmosphere, cliffhanger pacing — that comic books would absorb wholesale a decade later. The artist is signed at lower right but the signature is partially illegible; it reads Edgar Franklin Wittmack, a regular pulp illustrator of the period.