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Two covers from a short-lived pulp called The Mysterious Wu-Fang. I couldn’t find too much about this magazine, although an entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction does give a little background.
US Pulp magazine, seven issues September 1935 to March 1936, monthly, published by Popular Publications; edited by Edythe Seims working for Rogers Terrill. Intended to capitalize on the popularity of Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu-Manchu, The Mysterious Wu Fang showed the “Dragon Lord of Crime” seeking world domination, sometimes using sf means in the attempt.
Our first cover, from October 1935, shows an instance of likely human sacrifice of a pretty woman:
For the second, we have an ISFDB entry and Jerome Rozen’s original cover painting, showing a lot of peril.
The cover in original context:
Both versions found at Pulp Covers.
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Readers who will cast their minds back to the Shon Richards’s Nion Encephalization Enhancement stories (which begin here will remember the whimsical figure of Clown Girl, that avatar of her own erotic counter-reality. Longtime friend of the site Lucy Fidelis here offers her own version of Clown Girl.
Lucy maintains a DeviantArt site here and a Tumblr here, and if you like what you see, you can help help support her on Patreon, as I do!
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We close with covers from near the beginning and the end of Dime Mystery‘s existence. From way back in December 1934 we have one with a very Shadow over Innsmouth vibe.
(Woefully thin ISFDB entry for this issue here.) The Pulp Covers scan is of a copy which unfortunately has suffered a fair amount of wear. The index at Galactic Central provides a brighter and cleaner, bur also smaller, version of the same cover.
Nearing the end, in June 1948, Dime Mystery came up with this cover.
We might now be living in brightly smiling, clean-scrubbed, post-war, neo-Puritan America, but we can still manage a cover in which the pretty blonde is at least somewhat scantily clad, and certainly looks to be in a bit of peril. Evidence that the Spirit of Exploitation will never really die out, as long as humans themselves do not die out.
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As with items in nature, some Dime Mystery covers defy easy classification and make one wonder just what the artist or editors were thinking, and closing out with two days of posts on them seems as good as any way to finish up this series. In April 1938 someone came up with an imaginative series of tortures, though I cannot figure the rationale for their exact sequencing.
The curators at Pulp Covers provide some example of interior art from this issue, two of which seem to be classic examples of bound damsels being subject to some sort of mad science.
Another of which is an example of the Consigned to the flames trope.
And there’s some good-old-fashioned bondage, in this case with the hint of a cuckolding fantasy. (Bondage Blog kindly take note.)
The good curators at Pulp Covers have made the entire issue available for download.
But real zaniness was coming later in the year with the October 1938 issue.
The Pulp Covers curators were as baffled by this as I am. “Is he using attractive women as clappers in giant church bells which he controls with his Keyboard of Evil? I honestly have no idea what is going on here. None whatsoever.”
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On at least two occasions Dime Mystery featured covers with women being threatened with some sort of corkscrew-like device. There is June 1936 (ISFDB entry here).
By the cover of August 1938, the villains were being significantly more thorough.
As the curators at Pulp Covers remark, “This poor woman is being drilled, snake harassed & branded, which might seem like overkill to some people.” Indeed.