A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1920 — all 136 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 · 136 pages · 1920

The Black Mask

1920 · Free to read

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About this issue

A woman in a silk nightgown and copper-red wrap reaches toward a lamp on a side table, her face turned in alarm toward two masked figures lurking at the curtains — one on each flank, their black domino masks echoing the title's small logo above. The cover-line reads A Magazine of Mystery, Romance and Adventure, and the painted scene delivers exactly that contract: imperiled femininity, anonymous threat, a domestic space turned dangerous. Priced at twenty cents and printed on cheap wood-pulp stock, Black Mask launched in 1920 as a general-fiction pulp before editors steered it toward the hardboiled crime voice — Hammett, Chandler — that would define American noir and, by direct inheritance, the crime comic. The cover artist is unidentified here.

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