Weird Tales, Vol. 6, No. 3

A masked figure in black robes leaps over a prone woman laid out on what reads as a sacrificial altar, dagger raised — behind him, a caped accomplice lurks in shadow against a blazing red ground. The cover dramatizes Greye La Spina's featured story, The Gargoyle: A Tale of Devil Worship, and the composition reduces its female figure to passive victim, a convention the pulps recycled relentlessly. Weird Tales, launched in 1923, sold at 25 cents on wood-pulp paper to readers hungry for horror, the occult, and the uncanny. Its contributor list this issue — O. Henry, H. P. Lovecraft, Frank Belknap Long Jr. — maps almost exactly the literary DNA that would flow directly into comic-book horror anthologies of the 1950s.