Argosy All-Story Weekly, Vol. 124, No. 2

A woman in a scarlet dress lunges forward, pistol raised, her loose hair and open coat caught mid-motion against a dusty Western townscape — all kinetic urgency, rendered in warm ochres and crimson by a house illustrator whose signature is partially legible but cannot be confirmed. The cover announces Charles Alden Seltzer's serial The Stray-Man, signaling the Western adventure fiction that filled Argosy's pages at ten cents a copy. Frank Munsey's Argosy, launched in 1882 and later merged with All-Story Weekly, was the original wood-pulp magazine — cheap paper, vivid painted covers, relentless genre fiction. Its formula of serialized adventure, crime, and romance gave the coming comic book its narrative pace, its genre vocabulary, and its faith that popular fiction could move fast and hit hard.