Boys' Story Papers

Before there were comic books there were the boys' story papers — cheap, heavily illustrated weeklies that ran serialized adventure fiction for a young readership hungry for shipwrecks, school scrapes, pirates, and far-flung empire. They sat on the newsstand beside the penny dreadful and shared its economics — a penny or two, a fresh installment every week, a lurid or heroic front-page woodcut to pull the reader in — but aimed themselves at boys and, often, at their parents' idea of what boys ought to read.

This gallery gathers three of them. The Boy's Own Paper (London, 1879), published by the Religious Tract Society, offered wholesome adventure, school stories, natural history, and how-to columns as a deliberate answer to the dreadfuls. Young Folk's Weekly Budget (London) was a brisk British boys' paper of serialized adventure, running fiction like Kairon, the Young Charioteer. The American Boy (Detroit, 1899) carried the same appetite across the Atlantic — outdoor stories, sport, and self-improvement for a rising American readership.

Every cover here is public domain, scanned from the Villanova University Digital Library and restored, watermarked, and presented at comicbooks.com. Together they trace the illustrated adventure weekly the comic book would inherit.