CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/12/2014

Jim Shaw: The Hidden World

Featured image, of a vintage Amazing Stories magazine featuring artwork and writing by outsider sci-fi legend Richard Shaver, is reproduced from The Hidden World, Jim Shaw's magnificent compendium of out-there American graphic materials and educational / religious propaganda. Shaw explains, "In the beginning Shaver was working in an auto assembly plant in Detroit, and a welding gun would be swung to him and he started having these visions from the arcs and sparks and he realized that it was the Dero, who were the deranged robots who had survived from the pre-flood civilizations. And they lived inside the earth and they would aim rays at people and make them go insane. And they had all these things, they would kidnap earth women and they would subject them to these sexual stimulations rays, so they would have orgasm deaths. It was these fantasies and they would be printed in a science-fiction magazine that Ray Palmer edited. Every time one of his stories would appear they would sell 100,000 extra copies and it was featured in Life magazine. Then the fact that he had actually been in an insane asylum during this period came out, so it kind of fizzled away."