The Black Mask

A woman in a silk nightgown and copper-red wrap reaches toward a lamp on a side table, her face turned in alarm toward two masked figures lurking at the curtains — one on each flank, their black domino masks echoing the title's small logo above. The cover-line reads A Magazine of Mystery, Romance and Adventure, and the painted scene delivers exactly that contract: imperiled femininity, anonymous threat, a domestic space turned dangerous. Priced at twenty cents and printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, Black Mask launched in 1920 as a general-fiction pulp before editors steered it toward the hardboiled crime voice — Hammett, Chandler — that would define American noir and, by direct inheritance, the crime comic. The cover artist is unidentified here.