Weird Tales, January 1926

A robed figure, white-turbaned and bearded, looms over a recumbent man whose upturned face catches a cone of yellow light beamed from a black mechanical device. Above them both, a ghostly face materializes in a circular lens — the stolen soul of the story's title. The painted cover illustrates Charles H. Craig's story Stealer of Souls, and its imagery crystallizes everything Weird Tales promised: science weaponized against the spirit, the occult made mechanistic. At 25 cents, printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, Weird Tales (self-billed "The Unique Magazine") was the crucible in which H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith forged the horror and sword-and-sorcery genres that comic books would inherit wholesale.