New Buffalo Bill Weekly

This five-cent weekly depicts a gunfight between a frontier scout and Native American figures, with a dead buffalo in the foreground. Published by Street & Smith, the magazine serialized sensational tales of the American West for working-class readers hungry for action and adventure. Penny dreadfuls and their successors—cheap weeklies like this—formed the direct ancestor of American comic books. These mass-produced publications offered serialized melodrama, crime, and frontier violence at prices ordinary workers could afford. Such weekly serials trained readers in visual storytelling and episodic narrative, establishing conventions the comic book medium would inherit and expand.