Black Mask was a pulp running mostly detective fiction, some of which was very fine indeed, as one might infer from the September 1929 cover:

The magazine had an unusually long life for a pulp, running in some form from 1920 until 1951. Some of the cover art was also quite interesting; the subject here is an experiment undertaken in its 1937 art with dynamic silhouettes used to suggest action, unusual in the level of abstraction used to convey ideas. Here is September:

May boils some story down to its most fundamental ideas: hero, villain, damsel.

But for sheer dynamism and sense of threat it seems hard to match January cover with its heroine supine, vulnerable, threatened and yet armed. Like the others, it’s a story in itself.

All covers found on the Galactic Central index page.