A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1888 — all 16 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.

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A complete issue · 16 pages · 1888

Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 578

1888 · Free to read

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About this issue

"The Prisoner of the Weird Isles" by Edward L. Wheeler This serial adventure, published in Beadle and Adams' Deadwood Dick, Jr., Afloat series, opens in San Francisco when a young detective named Richard Bristol—known as Deadwood Dick, Junior—encounters a starving minstrel musician named Tobias Green. Green produces a message in a bottle, discovered near Auckland, New Zealand. The message is from Falconer Fairfax, an English ship captain imprisoned on an uncharted South Pacific island called Weird Island. Fairfax reports that his own son Frank orchestrated the scuttling of their vessel and has left him enslaved under a dwarf white convict named Gogel, who tortures him monthly. Fairfax begs for rescue. Dick cables London's Lord Mayor and learns Felix Fairfax, the imprisoned man's younger son, is en route to San Francisco. The narrative appears designed to launch an expedition plot combining detective work with exotic island adventure.

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Each page has its own page — the cartoon, who’s in it, and what the satire means.