The Shadow of the Cross

The Shadow of the Cross (1843) is a mid-nineteenth-century religious tract or devotional volume, predating the wood-pulp magazine era by half a century. No illustrated cover image is available for description here. What can be said is that works like this — earnest, morally urgent, printed cheaply for mass circulation — share a direct lineage with the penny dreadfuls and dime novels that followed, which themselves seeded the pulp magazines of the 1890s–1940s. Those pulps borrowed mass-market urgency and serialized storytelling from earlier popular print, eventually passing both to the comic book. Artist and cover details unconfirmed.