Robert Gibson Jones and the Shaver Mystery in Life

In my previous post I wrote about Winthrop Sargeant's discussion of the Richard S. Shaver and the Shaver Mystery in a Life magazine article of May 1951.  I expressed the opinion that Sargeant may have helped Shaver remain an influence in science fiction without intending to because Sargeant's article ran a cover of the June 1947 Amazing Stories issue that featured the Shaver Mystery.

Readers looked at Life, but didn't read it. 

I want to expand on my reasoning since many of my readers are unfamiliar with Life magazine in its old weekly incarnation.  Life wasn't always a special-issue magazine focused on one topic.  It was a large-format People magazine.  The cover story of the May 1951 issue promised a review of the latest in women's beachwear.  Most readers paged through the magazine, checked out the pictures, and skimmed an article or two.  Thus Shaver benefited from the article because the Amazing Stories cover was the only cover of a science fiction magazine shown in the article and because many readers only skimmed the article.  

Life describes cover illustration, created by Robert Gibson Jones, in a caption:

The "Deros," subhuman cave dweller, decorate cover of Amazing Stories' issue devoted to their evil doings.  Dero statues look down on human who has driven into their cave while live deros at entrance (bottom, right) fire at him.  ( Life May 21, 1951, p137 caption)

Nothing critical of Richard S. Shaver or the Shaver Mystery appears in the caption.  The criticism is buried in the text.

June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories (PD-US via Wikimedia)

How strange was the Amazing Stories cover?

The bizarre statues with their grotesque facial expressions certainly arrested the eyes of casual newsstand customers.  The image, although weird and outlandish, wasn't distasteful.  Readers saw such illustrations, or illustrations that used some of the elements of the Amazing cover, almost everyday.  Robert Gibson Jones drew well within the bounds of standards of popular illustration prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s.  

Readers saw faces similar to those of statues in the work of the very popular Boris Atzybasheef.  Artzybasheef's illustrations frequently appeared on the cover of Time magazine, the sister publication of Life.  You can see a few of Artzybasheef's ads here:   http://gogd.tjs-labs.com/gallery-view?illustrator=BORIS*ARTZYBASHEFF.

The Robert Gibson Jones's source for the illustration, however, may have been the Captain Marvel adventures that appeared in Fawcett comics in the early 1940s.  On the pages below from Whiz Comics #25 (Dec. 26, 1941 Vol 25 No 5), Billy Batson visits the wizard Shazam.  (This comic book is now in the public domain and available for free download from Digital Comics Museum.)

In his Amazing stories cover, Jones appears to have fused the pictorial elements of three panels.  He found the inspiration for the car, at least in part, in the "weird vehicle" that Billy Batson enters in a "a forgotten section of the subway."  The composition of Jones's cover reproduces the colors and some of the forms of the "fantastic cavern-like pathway."  The panel showing Batson running in a dark passage decorated with statues of the seven deadly sins inspired Jones's depiction of the dero statues.

Shazam!

The photo editors at Life adhered to exacting standards.  They chose to illustrate a Sargeant's article with a cover of Amazing Stories because the cover would interest their readers without violating canons of taste.  Moreover, the editors knew the strangeness of the cover was familiar.

To illustrate the material the editors may have passed over, consider the following pin-up style cover.  It's available as a poster from Amazon.  (Mouse over the image to learn price and click to order.)

Robert Gibson Jones and the Shaver Mystery in Life by Mark Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.