The Golden Argosy, Vol. V, No. 34

A boy clings to a harpoon buried in the back of a breaching whale as the creature surges through heavy seas — the full-page wood-engraved illustration for George H. Coomer's serial "Tom Gale's Ride," exactly as the caption promises: Tom Gale clung desperately to one of the harpoons in the whale's back, as the leviathan rushed away at a tremendous speed. The ornate Gothic masthead, The Golden Argosy, frames a vignette of a tall-ship under sail. Frank Munsey's weekly, priced at two dollars per year, preceded the pulp era proper but pioneered its essential bargain: cheap paper, cheap price, maximum incident. Its adventure-fiction formula fed directly into the story-papers and dime novels from which the pulp magazines — and eventually the comic book — drew their narrative DNA.