SYNOPSIS: Kid steps off what I presume is a school bus and notices a hand gesturing that he step through a gap in a paling fence. He meets a weird- and seedy-looking collection of obvious degenerates who offer him some mysterious pills. These immediately send him on some sort of trip which like many things, only seems to happen in the Chick universe.

They give him a few more of the pills with the warning that next time it will "cost him"!

Does it ever! He has no money so is reduced to burglary to get his next fix. Then the bad guys give him another free gift: A syringe! Wow! He gets really spaced out this time! But the bastards won’t give him any more of the stuff unless he sells drugs for them. Inevitably he gets caught in a police sting operation and is sentenced to a presumably lengthy stretch in an extremely rough-looking prison where he is immediately claimed by an even rougher-looking tattooed guy who takes him up to his cell for some late-night back-door romance.

Three months later the kid is diagnosed with AIDS, and a further six months later is about to kark it, when in the nick of time, somebody hands him a Chick Comic. He reads it and is thus saved and goes to heaven two days later. Phew…

ARTWORK: Great. Chick gets well away from the talking head format here. Well he has to - there are very few words - but the story is conveyed quite well. This story has many of the more playful comedic touches characteristic of his earlier work, sadly lacking in most of his later tracts.

MEMORABLE POINTS: The whole comic is pretty memorable actually. The psycho animals in the background of the alley in the opening panels are great. The kid’s expressions when he’s on drugs are priceless (if somewhat inaccurate). The gorillas in the prison look like troglodytes out of a low-budget horror movie, and everybody seems to have a thing about snake tattoos!

WEAK POINTS: I’ve seen people on heroin and other drugs, both on TV and actually in the streets, but I’ve never seen anybody with an expression like that kid’s! I also find it hard to believe that the authorities would send a young kid into a prison like that on his first offence. It might happen on TV, and in the ramblings of the average barstool philosopher, but not in real life.

Also, a prisoner in the terminal stages of AIDS is not likely to be left alone in an ordinary jail cell like that.

Chick doesn’t seem to be able to make up his mind what the sequence of events is after you die. Some people seem to go straight to heaven (or hell), others are required to wait anything from 1,000 to 2,500 years to be "judged" although it does seem to me that the verdict is a foregone conclusion!

Download Trust Me! from Chick Publications