Argosy, Vol. 118, No. 2

A lantern-bearing figure looms over a man collapsed on the ground—nocturnal, threatening, the light catching the victim's upturned face against a deep blue ground. The cover-line, "The Big Boss in Bronze" by Holman Day, promises industrial intrigue or labor conflict, the word bronze doing double work as menace and metaphor. Argosy, founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, was the original pulp magazine—ten cents a copy, fiction wall-to-wall. Its painted covers trained readers to expect genre at a glance: crime, adventure, the uncanny. The formulas Argosy and its descendants refined—the isolated victim, the unseen threat, the dramatic chiaroscuro—passed almost unchanged into the first comic books of the late 1930s.