Yes, back when I was a fundamentalist Christian, I actually distributed Jack Chick tracts. And since there’s usually great interest here whenever a new one comes down the pike, I thought folks might have questions for possibly the only person here who seriously used them as they were intended. 
So, if anyone is curious, fire away. I’ll try to answer as best I can.
Which one was your favorite back then, and why?
What made you fall out of faith?
Did you honestly, truly think that you were changing the lives of people you gave them to or was it more of an attempt to score points with God?
Did you willingly hand out tracts or what?
(I’ve never received any JC tracts, but I’ve loads of Watch Tower and a few JC like tracts from the odd Fire and Brimstone Baptists down the road.)
What was your “wake up call” when you started thinking for yourself?
What was your family’s reaction to leaving the flock, if any?
I’ve always enjoyed your posts, faithfool
Did you ever actually hand them to people, or did you just leave them in obvious places and take off?
Where did you get them all? Did your church have boxes of them delivered everytime there was a new one? Did they have to pay for it?
You gotta bear with me because I quit handing them out sometime around the mid-to-late 80s and trying to remember which ones where what has an extra hang up for me… It appears that as lots of the older ones have been updated, copyright dates have been changed to reflect their most recent publications. So with that in mind, the two that seemed to be my favorites were Holy Joe and The Sissy. I usually gravitated toward those that I wished to emulate; depicted by the Christian as a happy, loving sort rather than the ones with judgmental and superior attitudes.
A World History class in college started me questioning things and it’s only increased from there.
I did believe I was trying to help people. I was so terrified someone would go to hell because I didn’t attempt to do anything to prevent it and considering I always didn’t feel ‘good enough’ anyway, it never crossed my mind that God might give me Brownie points for the effort. 
Were you raised in an extremist fundamentalist family?
Do you now think that you may have been insane back then?
Were you part of some organized group? Did they try to “save” you when you started losing your faith? Did you convince any of your fellows at the time that they needed to get out from under?
I like those old ones. Much more entertaining than the new stuff. Especially like the Tom of Finland undertones of The Sissy.
Indeed, I handed them out willingly. I saw many of my friends (I was a teenager then) embarassed by witnessing and that scared me because I saw this as kowtowing to your own ego rather than saving someone from eternal damnation. I knew which should be more important.
As mentioned above, I guess the culprit in my “wake up call” would have been college. In regards to thinking for myself, even within such strict boundaries, I was always a bit outside of the box. I didn’t see why women couldn’t be preachers, for example.
And for my family, they believe I’m in the Express Handbasket to Hell. There is but many reasons my mother believes I’m demon possessed. :rolleyes:
Thank you Shirley, for saying such a nice thing. The feelings are mutual, as I’ve been a big fan of yours since my very first Secret Santa that you organized.
Both. On at least one occasion, I did so from a street corner, just like any garden variety lunatic. Mostly though, they got passed around to friends I was trying to convert. The rest of the time, they were just cool for me to read because back then I didn’t see the logical fallacies (Like, who man, you’ve NEVER heard of Jesus before!?! And that’s all it takes to make everything right!!!11) and liked the comic book aspect.
There was a Christian bookstore not too far from where my softball team always went after practice and while everyone else was hanging out afterwards smoking and talking, I’d go over there and buy stuff. My church, on the other hand, didn’t do the tract thing at all, even within the youth ministry.
Nope, pretty much not raised in church at all, unless you count the times my mother toted me up along there for some specific reason, like Easter. However, we became a fixture when my grandfather died and my mother began to face her own mortality that he’d painted from his very black and white and hellfire strewn world.
Eh, I was in the youth group, but I’m not sure how organized that made us. 
And by the time I “left,” I was at a different church and in my early 20s, so no one really tried to convince me otherwise. Of course, I didn’t announce it or anything and I’d done the slowly becoming-less-involved business, so perhaps it wasn’t really noticed. I also didn’t try to take anyone with me for a variety of reasons: 1) at this point, I wasn’t really close to anyone anymore, 2) I wasn’t really sure of my own feelings on the matter outside of simply not believing as strenuously and 3) I’m just not like that. Sure, if there’d been questions, I’d have attempted to explain. But to basically say that my way was the best wasn’t going to happen anymore then than now.
Yeah, there seemed to at least be some crumb of humanity originally versus what’s seemed to take over with the incessant finger wagging and harsh moralizing. I think back then there were only a handful of tracts who actually came out against other religions and ‘lifestyles’; some on Catholicism, one on Jehova’s Witnesses, that sort of thing. But overall it wasn’t a litany against everything and everybody.
I found thisone at Target a few weeks ago. I had never seen one in the flesh…as it were.
Where did you live at the time? I’ve never seen one before and the only place I ever see them being talked about is right here.
As plentiful as they seem on the Dope, the reverse can be true in the wild. 
Dallas, in a sort of older, run down area. However, our church was kind of uppity and completely across town, so there was a mixture of locations. Fittingly, I still occasionally see them in places like Wal*Mart restrooms.
Did you convert anyone? And when you were handing them out, did you actually think anyone hadn’t heard of Jesus and just needed to be told about him?
Actually, no, I don’t believe I ever converted anyone and, at the same time, I’m not sure if I really thought anyone hadn’t heard of Jesus or what I felt the problem was. All I knew was that I couldn’t worry about whether or not it embarassed me to try and reach them or if they didn’t like me for the effort. I had to do my best to prevent them from hell. That’s the only important thing I could see, not that my actions weren’t really helping anyone. 
Thanks everyone for the questions. This has been somewhat cathartic.
If there was a cost, did you pay for them, either directly or by donation, prayer offering, etc?
FML
Can the peeps who actually distribute the things get ahold of rare/discontinued ones like Wounded Children (anti-homosexual focus) and Satan’s Master (anti-occultism, as the title makes clear)? Those are a couple of the best as far as twisted storylines, out-there dialog (“Here, man – get a RUSH!” “I’m so high I’m FLYING!” ; "Ri-Chan, show Elsie what it’s like to go out a closed window – NOW!" “YAAAAAAHHHH!!”) and bizarre imagery are concerned, and you can’t read them on the Chickster’s website.
Did you ever read the full color ones with The Crusaders duo? Each one had these two guys, one white & the other black, on adventures with Evangelical themes- smuggling Bibles, busting covens, fighting the Illuminati, and then they met “ex-Jesuit” Alberto Rivera & it all went downhill from there?
Didn’t any fellow Christians try to steer you away from Chick? And was this Christian bookstore an independent one? The chain ones mostly stopped carrying Chick’s stuff in the late 1970s.