British magician, writer, painter, and world-class eccentric Tony “Doc” Shiels died on July 12; he was 86. He began performing as “Doc Shiels: Wizard of the West” in the early ’60s, and in 1975 he set up Tom Fool’s Theatre of Tom Foolery. Shiels was widely covered in the media worldwide for his monster hoaxes: he tried to raise Morgawr the Cornish sea monster (with the help of a bevy of naked “witches”), Owlman of Mawnan, and of course the Loch Ness monster. He wrote several plays and books on “magick,” and continued to paint in a style he described as surrealchemy. In one of his book blurbs, Shiels described himself as “a modern monster-hunter, an author of several books on stage magic, a founder-editor of the surrealist magazine Nnidnid, a poet, playwrite and artist, a Punch and Judy professor, and one time Wizard of the Western world.”
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