Argosy All-Story Weekly

Argosy All-Story Weekly holds a singular place in popular fiction: launched by Frank Munsey in 1882, it became the first all-fiction pulp magazine, printing adventure, romance, science fiction, and weird tales on cheap wood-pulp paper and selling them for a dime. Its painted covers—muscular heroes, exotic landscapes, menacing villains rendered in bold oils—established the visual grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale. The magazine introduced readers to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and John Carter, serialized lost-world romances, and ran hardboiled crime long before the genre had a name. Every genre the comic book claimed as its own was road-tested here first, issue by weekly issue.