From the 18th cen­tu­ry onward, the gen­res of Goth­ic hor­ror and fan­ta­sy have flour­ished, and with them the sen­su­al­ly vis­cer­al images now com­mon­place in film, TV, and com­ic books. These gen­res per­haps reached their aes­thet­ic peak in the 19th cen­tu­ry with writ­ers like Edgar Allan Poe and illus­tra­tors like Gus­tave Dore. But it was in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry that a more pop­ulist sub­genre tru­ly came into its own: “weird fic­tion,” a term H.P. Love­craft used to describe the pulpy brand of super­nat­ur­al hor­ror cod­i­fied in the pages of Amer­i­can fan­ta­sy and hor­ror mag­a­zine Weird Tales—first pub­lished in 1923. (And still going strong!) A pre­cur­sor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often con­sid­ered the defin­i­tive ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry venue for weird fic­tion and illus­tra­tion. But we need only look back a few years and to anoth­er con­ti­nent to find an ear­li­er pub­li­ca­tion, serv­ing Ger­man-speak­ing fans—Der Orchideen­garten (“The Gar­den of Orchids”), the very first hor­ror and fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine, which ran 51 issues from Jan­u­ary 1919 to Novem­ber 1921. The mag­a­zine fea­tured work from …