The Argosy, Vol. 51, No. 5

A wood-engraved interior illustration serves as this issue's visual centerpiece: a woman in widow's black and a white cap kneels in prayer beside a high-backed chair, a candelabra burning above her, while a second figure in pale dress hovers ghost-like in the background — Gothic melodrama rendered in precise crosshatch. The Argosy, founded by Frank Munsey in 1882 and reformatted onto cheap wood-pulp paper by 1888, is widely credited as the first true pulp magazine. At ten cents, it delivered serialized fiction to a mass audience and proved the commercial formula — affordable paper, gripping stories, evocative imagery — that later pulps refined into painted covers and genre categories the comic book would eventually inherit wholesale. Artist unconfirmed.