A blue alien creature with a serpentine body threatens two armed figures in a desert landscape of rust-colored rock formations. The female figure wears a yellow halter top; the male sports a green uniform and wields a ray gun. This cover advertises "Enemy of the Qua" by Dwight V. Swain, part of Imaginative Tales' formula of action-driven science fiction. Pulp magazines of the 1950s relied on painted cover art to signal genre and promise adventure to newsstands buyers. These ten-cent publications—printed on cheap wood pulp paper—serialized short stories and novellas that defined early American science fiction before the medium migrated to comic books and paperback anthologies.
About this artifact
- Date
- March 1956
- Rights
- Public domain — free to view, share, and reuse.
- Restoration
- Digitally restored and hosted by comicbooks.com.
Part of our mission to preserve and restore the public-domain heritage of the medium.