The Popular Magazine, December 7, 1920

This pulp fiction monthly sold for 25 cents and featured serialized novels and short stories by popular writers of the era. The cover illustration—a weathered man in a cap, rendered in oil or pastel—exemplifies the representational cover art used to attract readers to interior fiction rather than comic narratives. Unlike the newspaper comic strips that were simultaneously developing visual storytelling through sequential panels and speech balloons, pulp magazines relied on single dramatic images to convey mood and genre. Both media competed for working-class readership in the early twentieth century, yet comics' panel-based grammar would ultimately reshape how stories were told visually.