The Metal Monster

This opening installment of A. Merritt's The Metal Monster appeared in Argosy-Allstory Weekly, Vol. CXXIV, No. 1. The cover is typographic rather than painted — the story title rendered in bold copperplate script dominates the page, signaling prestige serialization rather than sensational imagery. Argosy, founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, is the direct ancestor of the American pulp magazine. It pioneered serialized genre adventure — lost worlds, science fiction, sword-and-sorcery — feeding the mass appetite that comic books would inherit a generation later. Merritt, the era's most popular fantasy writer, had already published The Moon Pool here; The Metal Monster extended his reputation for hallucinatory, biologically strange science fiction.