Argosy All-Story Weekly

A woman in classical robes recoils from a sky split by alien light-beams—an image pitched somewhere between mythology and catastrophe. The cover promotes Ray Cummings's serial *The Fire People*, with the rhetorical cover-lines *"Improbable? Yes! Interesting? Very!!"* doing the selling. Bold red-and-gold lettering crowns the composition in the magazine's signature stacked-title format. *Argosy All-Story Weekly* was the dominant wood-pulp fiction magazine of the era, printing on cheap newsprint and relying on painted covers to move copies at ten cents each. From its pages—and those of competitors like *Weird Tales* and *Amazing Stories*—emerged the template for science fiction, horror, and adventure that the comic book would absorb wholesale within two decades.