Weird Tales, Vol. 9, No. 2

A white-bearded sorcerer recoils in terror beside a prone, fair-skinned woman shrouded in spectral light — the cover scene for Seabury Quinn's story "The Man Who Cast No Shadow." A green candle gutters at her feet; an ominous dark column bisects the frame. The bold slab-serif logotype Weird Tales — The Unique Magazine anchors the red border, promising transgression for a quarter. This is pulp at its most earnest: wood-pulp paper, lurid painted covers, and overwrought genre fiction sold on newsstands from 1923 onward. Weird Tales gave early publication to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, its covers trafficking in the imperiled-woman imagery that would migrate directly into the first comic-book horror anthologies of the 1940s.