From the exhibition
Street & Smith's New York Weekly
· February 28, 1867
A woman in flowing dress confronts a grotesque wolf-creature in this cover illustration for "Water-Wolf," a serialized story running in Street & Smith's New York Weekly. Published for working-class readers at fifty cents per year, penny dreadfuls like this offered weekly installments of sensational fiction—tales of crime, supernatural horror, and melodrama. Featuring lurid woodcut illustrations and serialized novels by popular authors, these papers satisfied Victorian appetites for thrills and moral transgression in compact, affordable form. The penny dreadful's model of serialized narrative, visual spectacle, and genre adventure would directly influence the development of comic books decades later.
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