Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 15, 1921

A cowboy in leather chaps and a loose-sleeved shirt reins his pinto horse into a dramatic pivot, one arm raised holding what appears to be a saddle, while a dark-haired woman in the foreground looks up at him admiringly. The cover tagline — Epic of a Sir Galahad of the Cow Country — announces Evelyn Campbell's serial The Knight of Lonely Land, mapping Arthurian romance onto the Western range. At ten cents a copy or four dollars yearly, Argosy All-Story Weekly was the dominant wood-pulp fiction magazine of its era, its cheap paper and vivid painted covers delivering adventure, romance, and genre fiction to millions of readers. Magazines like this one directly seeded the storytelling conventions — the lone hero, the imperiled woman, the chivalric code transposed to American myth — that comic books absorbed and amplified from the 1930s onward.