The Argosy, Vol. 65

This page opening — not a painted cover but a letterpress title spread — represents The Argosy at the height of its founding influence. Frank Munsey's magazine, launched in 1882 and reformatted as an all-fiction weekly in 1896, was the first true pulp: printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, priced for working readers, unencumbered by illustration. The April 1898 issue opens Chapter XIII of Sydney Hodges's Colonel Fane's Secret, its serif type and restrained chapter headings the visual grammar of the era. No lurid painted cover yet — that would come later — but The Argosy's formula of serialized adventure, romance, and mystery across every genre directly seeded the illustrated pulps of the 1920s–40s and, through them, the comic book.