Another macabre visual trope often employed at Dime Mystery Magazine involved a line or row of pretty women, presumably all dead or possibly in some sort of state of suspended animation. They might represent either failed experiments, or the villains of the stories want lots of dead women around. We have already seen one example of the trope on the February 1940 cover where, if you look past the foreground figures of the mad scientist and his pretty victim, you’ll see a stack of at least three other women, apparently frozen in blocks of ice. This trope will repeat, for example, on the March 1940 cover.

Evidently this “row of pretty corpses” was enough of a hit with Dime Mystery’s audience that the editors went with it the very next month for their April 1940 edition.

It’s a testament to how often themes repeat at Dime Mystery that I think could have put either of these covers without too much of a stretch into the categories of coffin stuffers as well.