Weird Tales: "The Bat-Men of Thorium" by Bertram Russell

A dense, ink-scratched illustration opens Bertram Russell's serial: a writhing creature—part sea-beast, part nightmare architecture—fills the frame while a figure swings an axe below. The caption anchors the chaos: "The monster writhed horribly as Griggs swung the ax." Above, hand-lettered display type stacks THE BAT-MEN OF THORIUM in jagged, organic letterforms that feel alive with menace. Weird Tales (founded 1923) was the crucible of American weird fiction—H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard all appeared in its wood-pulp pages. Its interior illustrations, rendered in pen-and-ink for cheap reproduction, trained readers to expect the impossible made visceral. The genre vocabulary here—lost world, radioactive mineral "Thorium," winged humanoids—fed directly into the science-fantasy DNA of the comic book decade ahead.