The Popular Magazine, April 7, 1922

This pulp fiction magazine cover celebrates baseball's 1922 season opening with a surrealist image of spectators losing their hats and composure as a giant baseball soars overhead. Published twice monthly at twenty cents, *The Popular Magazine* represented the mass-market fiction industry that thrived alongside newspaper comics. While comics pioneered sequential art and character continuity in dailies and Sunday pages, pulp magazines competed for readers with illustrated short stories and serials. Both media shaped twentieth-century visual storytelling, though pulps relied on single cover images rather than the panel-driven narrative sequences that would define the comic strip as a distinct art form.