All-Story Weekly, Feb. 3, 1917

A dark-haired woman turns in profile, jeweled headband and beaded necklace catching the light, her loose garment slipping from one shoulder as wind lifts her hair against a mountain-and-foliage backdrop. The cover announces "The Argus Pheasant" by John Charles Beecham — A She-Devil in Beautiful Plumage — the tagline doing exactly what pulp cover-lines were invented to do: weaponize curiosity. All-Story Weekly (Frank Munsey's flagship, 10¢ a copy) was the proving ground for serialized adventure at industrial scale; its painted covers promised exotic peril, romance, and sensation to a mass newsstand audience. The genres comic books would later claim as their own — sword-and-sorcery, lost-world adventure, hardboiled intrigue — were first mass-marketed on covers precisely like this one.