The All-Story Magazine, May 1907

Two polo players on galloping horses crowd the picture plane, mallets raised, horses' necks nearly tangled — a moment of athletic collision rendered in broad, confident brushwork signed J. N. Marchand. Bold red serif type names the magazine above the action; the price (ten cents) and date flank the masthead in the corners. Published by Frank A. Munsey in New York and London, The All-Story was a wood-pulp monthly that paid writers by the word and printed everything: adventure, romance, science fiction, mystery. Its pages would eventually carry Edgar Rice Burroughs's first Tarzan and John Carter stories. Cheap paper, cheap ink, painted covers — this is the medium that taught popular fiction to think in images, a direct ancestor of the comic book's grammar of genre and spectacle.