Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 11, 1921

A woman in a plumed black hat and blue evening gown twists away from a mustachioed man in white tie who grabs at her shoulder — their struggle playing out before a crowded restaurant, chandelier glinting in the background. The cover advertises Whatever She Wants by Edgar Franklin, billed as "A Spirited Comedy of Love and Business," the yellow lettering pitched somewhere between drawing-room farce and melodrama. Argosy All-Story Weekly descended from Frank Munsey's 1882 Argosy, the founding wood-pulp magazine that proved cheap paper and cheaper cover prices — ten cents a copy — could sustain serialized fiction at industrial scale. Its pages incubated the genre machinery — adventure, crime, romance, weird fiction — that comic books would later inherit wholesale, panels replacing prose but the breathless cover hook unchanged.