Famous Western, October 1950

A cowboy in blue shirt and red bandana struggles against a rearing horse amid desert rocks, his revolver visible at his hip. The cover announces ten complete western stories at fifteen cents, including Edward Churchill's feature novel "Satan Rides the Sky" and tales by John Jo Carpenter and William O'Sullivan. This issue exemplifies the pulp magazine format that dominated American newsstands through mid-century: cheaply printed on wood-pulp paper, these magazines competed through sensational painted covers and serialized adventure fiction. Western pulps inherited conventions from dime novels while establishing tropes—the lone gunslinger, frontier justice, man-versus-nature conflict—that would flow directly into comic books and later film and television westerns.