Abstract: This article offers a way of reading literature published in illustrated magazines from the first half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the relationships established at a semiotic-material level between verbal texts, drawing, and print culture. The expressive effects of fiction in illustrated periodicals cannot be dissociated from drawing as a medium interrelated with other media, such as photography in modern periodical print culture. To further develop this proposal, the article analyzes short stories published in the magazines Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires 1898–1939) and En Viaje (Santiago 1933–1973) and examines how they contribute to "expanded materialities," that is, the materialities of illustrated print journals in which stories are interwoven in networks of relations with other contents in the magazine issue and with other print culture of the period more widely. The article argues that it is by virtue of these relations that short stories produce certain meanings about modernity through magazines, ones that are overlooked when readers only consider them as textual blocks that can be extracted from a magazine and printed in a book, ignoring their significant semiotic transformations.