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No, this isn't a picture of Jack Chick! However, in Chick comix, anybody from the Devil down with dodgy ethical or spiritual credentials is instantly recognizable: they nearly always wear a turtleneck sweater under a sports coat! Like the bad guys always wearing black hats in Westerns... I thought I should dress for the occasion:-)
WHO (OR WHAT:-) IS JACK CHICK?
Well, I guess one quick answer would be for you to visit his web site: www.chick.com and read all about it:-)
This I certainly urge you to do, but I guess it's a bit like watching the movie Plan Nine From Outer Space; it's so much more fun if you get a bit of the background first!
Jack Chick is most widely known for the little comics (roughly the size and shape of an airline ticket) that he publishes and sells world wide, mostly to streetcorner evangelists, who feel (or so I imagine) that they're doing an honest day of God's work by accosting total strangers with the offer of a free comic, containing a (in Chick's own words) "fun-to-read" rendition of some biblical point or other. And there are HUNDREDS of titles to choose from! More faint-hearted evangelists can play too, by simply leaving Chick comics in washrooms, in shopping malls, at airport lounges, under windscreen wipers in supermarket parking lots and so on.
“Fun to read”? They certainly are in a lot of cases, but not necessarily for the reasons the publishers intended! Some of them are written and drawn in a sober realistic style, while others are more like the Sunday funnies. The quality of the artwork varies enormously, making it hard to believe that they’re all drawn by Jack Chick as he implies on his website. Each one has a questionnaire at the end with a little box you can tick acknowledging Christ as your saviour, although what this achieves I’m not sure. To me it seems about as meaningful as clicking the “I accept” button at the end of the terms and conditions of a downloaded document!
Of course presenting biblical tracts and ideas in comic book form is nothing new, and I’m certainly not intending to denigrate the work of mainstream churches in this regard. Even The Watchtower, that mighty literary organ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, limits its use of squeaky-clean Biblical images to the fairly inoffensive illustration of various points in the text. Even the comics produced by that decidedly dodgy organization “The Children of God” still tend to be little more than matter-of-fact pictorial representations of their whacko “Endtime” expostulations.
Chick tracts are something entirely different…
There have been many web sites entirely or partially set up to discuss the Chick Phenomenon and you really have to read a few Chick comics to appreciate why people want to set up Web pages to discuss them, but basically the fascination is that, while the underlying message may be OK (and this is by no means always the case!), Chick’s methods of conveying the messages border on the moronic. You find yourself asking: “What kind of moron would take any notice of garbage like this?” (As alluded to earlier, if you enjoyed Plan 9 from Outer Space, you’d probably enjoy Chick Comics…) You keep finding yourself shaking your head and muttering the same things: Nobody talks like that! Nobody would act like that! etc. Many people’s first reaction upon seeing a Chick comic for the first time is start wondering if the stories weren’t written by some quadriplegic who has spent his entire life in a hospital room, typing with his tongue or someone similar....
The stories are supposed to give real-life examples or illustrations of what constitutes “right” and “wrong” behaviour, at least, according to The Thoughts of Chairman Chick. Essentially, just about all of us are on our way to Hell, and no amount of good works, saving of other souls or pious worship will make the slightest difference. The only thing that can get you into Heaven is apparently to beg forgiveness from Jesus, although Chick never really makes it clear what this entails. This is by far the loopiest aspect of Chick’s teachings: Just as it doesn’t seem to matter how good a person you were in deciding your fate in the afterlife, it similarly doesn’t matter how much of an absolute turd you were either, as long as you “accept Jesus into your life”. That’s OK as far as it goes, but Chick does spend an inordinate amount of time telling us about all the other things we should and shouldn’t be doing. But why? If it doesn’t make any friggin’ difference, why bother?!!
The other thing that most people find amusing is the notion that all us degenerate sinning types are that way because we are completely unaware of the existence of Jesus, his resurrection etc. This is of course ridiculous - even the most hard boiled card-carrying athiest (of a Western background anyway) would know at least the basics of the Christian tradition, and most English-speaking people can recite The Lord’s Prayer or at least parts of it.
According to Chick, God and Jesus are one and the same person, thus the Holy Trinity and all that stuff is a fabrication by the Devil. In fact just anything Chick disagrees with seems to a fabrication of the Devil. And, it appears, God/Jesus likes nothing better than to sit on a giant throne and lecture the deceased who didn’t come up to the Chick standard about what a lot of no-good low-life turds they are, before flinging them into the lake of fire.
According to Chick, the Catholic Church is little more than Satan worship, apparently because of its liking for fairly innocuous cermonies involving statues and bits of bread and so on. Jesus himself is supposed to have condemned the Catholic Church, a neat trick considering the Christian church only came into being after His crucifixion. There are quite a few Chick Publications devoted to this subject; one of these (“The Death Cookie”) is described in the reviews section.
Who else doesn’t Chick like? Freemasons, Witches, Jesuits, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Homosexuals, people who believe in Evolution, Astrology, Rock Music (which appears to mean anything from 1920s Charleston music to Marilyn Manson – it’s all controlled by the Big Man Downstairs ya see:-), Muslims, Buddhists – you name it…
Who does Chick like? Well, apart form the gullible turkeys who shell out their hard-earned dolleros for this tripe, that’s a good question!
One of the many things that make the film Plan 9 From Outer Space so unintentionally hilarious is that, although it had the most appalling script and special effects and (with a couple of exceptions) actors, the general presentation was OK. It obviously used competent cameramen and lighting people, the shots were mostly framed and edited correctly, the opening and closing titles (“opticals”) looked just like anything you’d see on any other “B” movie of that era – and even a couple of the actors were obviously “real” actors.
It’s a similar sort of thing with Chick Comics. They look like real comics and in many (but by no means all) cases the artwork is perfectly competent, it’s just that the stories are so putrid. Each one comes with a message, and Jack doesn’t believe in laying his messages on with a trowel – a cement rendering gun would be closer to the mark!
My very first encounter with a Chick comic was the compelling This Was Your Life, ) which, by a nice coincidence, was also the very first comic Chick ever produced, and apparently the most popular. Apart from the fact that the story doesn’t really make sense – I get the general drift: Bad man go to Hell, Good man, well … I think he also go to hell – it contains a number of er … scenes which Mr Chick appears to think are representative of naughty juvenile behaviour. For example, the naughty schoolboy says to his friends: “This is the dirtiest story I’ve ever heard!”
Now, seriously, have you ever heard anybody (of normal intelligence) over the age of five talk like that?!
So I began to wonder: “Just who is he writing this tripe for?”
Does he really believe this crap himself? He may well do so, but if his website is anything to go by, the poor deluded boy has sold a pretty impressive number of his works: 500 million and counting! So somebody must think they’re worth having.
Light Dawns....Then one day it hit me. Just think for a minute. His customers don’t on-sell the comics, they just give them away, to members of the public who are overwhelmingly likely to treat them with total derision. Now describe your average streetcorner evangelist. They’re usually lazy, not terribly clean-looking, boring, socially inept and generally none too bright.
To me, a “real” Christian, on the other hand, is by definition someone who follows the teachings of Christ. This does sometimes require effort! There is, (to my way of understanding, at any rate), an implicit obligation to at least give the appearance that being a Christian is a worthwhile lifestyle. If you want to put your saviour in the best possible light, it helps if you try to look as presentable as possible, just as it does when you’re selling any sort of product. A true Christian might be also called upon to do some sort of voluntary work; visit the sick or elderly; mow an old lady’s lawn; trim her hedge or something.
“Aww… WHA-A-AT?!! Hey no way man. You want me to … work?! I haven’t got time for that…
“Ya know, wouldn’t it be great if somebody could just print me up a whole pile of ready-made instructions of how to save your soul, and I could just stand on the street corner and hand them out to passers-by. Hey – I reckon I could save … twenty – thirty souls a day, prob’ly even more on weekends. That’d get me into heaven no trouble! Thirty a day – maybe 150 – 180 a week, say fifty weeks a year, what’s that?” - reaches for calculator; some minutes later: “Wow that’s … 750 souls a year!* Hot Damn!! – Oh! sorry, sorry…”
*(It’s all right kiddies, I know the answer is supposed to be 7,500 - it’s just a little joke, nothing to worry about…)
And that’s IT!! The mistake everybody makes is assuming that Chick is targeting the messages in his tracts at the mentality of the end user. But of course he doesn't; he targets them fairly and squarely at the sort of dipshit who thinks being a Christian means standing on a corner telling everybody else what they’re doing wrong. And because your average streetcorner God-botherer is unlikely to be a Muhummad Ali, Martin Luther King or Billy Graham - born with the gift of the Gab - Chick does all the work for you. In a nice, compact easy-to-read comic book format.
They’re not free, but they’re not outrageously expensive either. Well within the sort of budget likely to be available to the kind of sad sack who would be attracted to the “Deb Instant Mashed Potato” school of evangelism.
And that, boys and girls, is precisely what Chick Publications does. If you want to landscape your backyard, you go to a garden centre, where they have all the plants, soil, logs, fertilizers under one roof. If you want to build a deck, you go to a hardware store, and if you want to save souls, you go to Jack Chick’s One-Stop Christian Literature Warehouse! If you have any doubt about this, the cartoon below says it all! (I lifted it from the Chick site some years ago – it was only displayed for a short while)!
(Now here's a truly amazing thing: I originally set this site up several years ago, but due to a glitch at Yahoo Geocities, it got trashed a couple of years ago and I never got round to resurrecting it until now. But now they seem to be actually embracing what I just said with a comic called: "Who Me?")
Once you grasp the above concept, everything else falls into place. Again, I suppose you really need to read some of his comics to fully appreciate this, but many of the stories follow this same format:
Someone knowingly or unknowingly (ie most of us:-) is leading a sinful life and is bound for Hell. However all it takes for them to have their soul saved and their entry to heaven assured is for them to either read a Chick comic or have some kind person explain the “facts” about Jesus. Just llike that! The most hardened reprobate (and Chick’s depiction of these is often pretty hilarious) instantly becomes a gentle, loving “saved” Christian. All for just a few minutes’ work or the paltry US15c cost of a Chick comic.
Which is about as likely as somebody turning into Charles Atlas with 10 minutes work a day, or becoming a party animal guitar hero with only three nights’ practice, or losing 25 pounds in 10 days without dieting, or any of a thousand other unlikely outcomes promised in the classifieds or via spam for $29.95 money back guarantee. It’s nothing more than another way of preying on the weak, the insecure and the just plain dumb – this time for wannabe Billy Grahams etc.
But this is the intriguing part of it: With the “Charles Atlas”-type scam, the sucker usually runs out of enthusiasm fairly quickly, but they don’t often ask for their money back because that would be tantamount to admitting that they’re lazy slobs, who couldn’t manage to put in even the miniscule amount of effort allegedly required.
Chick comics are a different story. Because they’re simply given away, there’s no feedback whatever as to the comics’ effectiveness to the end user. So it’s rather like “freebie” local newspapers – circulation is guaranteed because they just throw them over your fence, whether you asked for them or not. Your streetcorner evangelist is pretty unlikely to follow up any of the recipients of his/her generosity so he/she has no way of knowing how many souls he/she has saved. So they just keep buying more and more and Chick keeps churning them out, and with his income stream growing, he can afford more artists/writers, as well as translators and so on.
It's no accident that a lot of the comics emphasize the notion that it doesn't matter squat how much of a good person you were towards your fellow man, how unselfishly you devoted yourself to charitable works and so on, as far as God is concerned you're no different from the lowest low-life scumbag, (or the sort of lazy peabrain who buys this sort of crap:-) It seems you'll never go broke telling people what they want to hear....
On their Web Site they claim that Chick Tracts are available in virtually any written language. However this is a bit misleading. Most of his comics are available in the more common languages such as English, French, German and Spanish, but as you get to the lesser-known tongues, the number of comic titles falls off dramatically. Actually, for the vast majority of the languages listed, there is only one title available: the ever-popular This Was Your Life! Interestingly, this particular tract has been printed not just with new text in the word balloons, but with the artwork redrawn for at least five different racial groups. So, apart from the original “Caucasian” version, there’s an “Arabicized” version for the Middle Eastern Markets (which is virtually the same except that the central character has been given a moustache and a swarthy complexion:-) plus completely re-drawn African, Asian, Indian (as in India) and Polynesian versions.
Incredibly, he even has a version of this tract in Inuit (Eskimo)! It’s just the Caucasian version with new text, but I never knew they had their own written language, which doesn’t look like anything else I’ve ever seen! You can read more in the review of This Was Your Life!
If you visit www.chick.com you’ll be amazed at the range of literature he now has available, and not just comics: he does books, videos – you name it. He also has articles on fun new ways of distributing his comics, very unconvincing (and totally anonymous) “testimonials” from users – you could spend hours in there! (As I said before, there seems little point describing it all here, as his Web site is very well set up and easy to navigate).
WHO DRAWS THIS STUFF?? On his web site, Chick implies that the comics are all his own work. Well that obviously couldn’t be the case: here is a montage of drawings from a number of different comics – this is definitely not the work of one illustrator.
In fact, a lot of his better-drawn comics are the work of a truly gifted artist called Fred Carter. Carter has produced some really fine work, particularly for the books Chick publishes. Actually I find it hard to accept that Carter takes this job seriously – some of his paintings of nubile women apparently caused Chick to lose some of his more straight-laced investors!
As for Chick himself, there doesn’t appear to be all that much information available. (That's assuming he exists at all of course!) He was supposed to have served in WWII, and was one of the handful of US servicemen to survive the battle of Okinawa, so perhaps this explains the bloodthirsty nature of a lot of the comics. I couldn’t find a picture of him, but he’s supposed to be a dead ringer for the late actor Slim Pickens.
It seems Chick does (or did) actually draw quite a few of the comics, but he specialized in the more cartoon-ish variety. If they really are his own work, then there’s nothing wrong with Chick as an artist; he has a dry and subtle sense of humour which manifests itself in all the little comedic touches he adds to his drawings. (Eg: lunatic cats and dogs in background are a particular favourite of his). Indeed one site describes him as “a cartoonist’s cartoonist”…
Some sites make mention of Chick being a multi-millionaire, which is entirely possible. He is apparently very hard to interview, and refuses to be photographed. He also convinced (or so he claims) that the Jesuits are out to assassinate him, which explains his habit of changing restaurant bookings several times in an evening. (Most restaurant staff are Mexican immigrants you see, who being almost universally Catholic, are of course directly controlled by the Pope and his Satanic minions, and thus present an extreme security risk:-).
Onward to some Chick Reviews:-)
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