A complete issue · 400 pages · 1875
The Argosy
A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1875 — all 400 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.
A complete issue · 400 pages · 1875
The Argosy is the ur-text of American popular fiction. Frank Munsey's decision in 1882 to fill his pages entirely with fiction—printed on cheap wood-pulp stock—created the format that would dominate mass-market storytelling for six decades. The Argosy's covers promised worlds: sea voyages, lost continents, frontier justice, exotic adventure. Its painted imagery and bold logotype trained readers to judge a story by its cover, a habit the comic book would inherit wholesale. From Argosy's pages emerged the serialized adventure formula—cliffhangers, exotic settings, heroic protagonists—that fed directly into the genre machinery of Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Black Mask, and ultimately the four-color comic book rack.
Each page has its own page — the cartoon, who’s in it, and what the satire means.