The Argosy, Vol. 51, No. 4

A wood-engraved frontispiece rather than a painted cover marks this as early *Argosy* — Frank Munsey's pioneering all-fiction weekly had not yet adopted the lurid oil-on-board imagery that would define the pulp era. Three figures occupy the scene: a Western-dressed man in a frock coat faces two robed figures in what reads as an exotic or colonial encounter, rendered in the crosshatched illustrative style of Victorian periodical fiction. *The Argosy* (founded 1882) is the acknowledged root of the entire pulp tradition — the first magazine printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and filled wall-to-wall with adventure fiction. Every genre the comic book later claimed — lost-world adventure, crime, weird mystery — flows directly from Munsey's gamble on cheap paper and cheaper thrills. Artist unconfirmed.