Famous Western, October 1956

A cowboy in a yellow shirt and white Stetson fires a revolver from a moving train, his red bandana streaming behind him. The cover advertises two stories: "Buzzard Bait" by Elton Webster and "High Stakes" by Norman Daniels. Published at twenty-five cents, Famous Western belonged to the final generation of pulp magazines—cheap wood-pulp publications that dominated newsstands from the 1920s through the 1950s. These adventure magazines, with their painted covers and short fiction, established genre conventions that comic books would adopt wholesale: the action hero, the dramatic gunfight, the fast-paced narrative. By 1956, television and paperback books were already displacing pulps, but Western tales remained commercially viable through the decade's close.