Common. These cartoons are so over the top they must be a joke. It would be like buying a Dilbert book as a serious guide to management.
Clearly you’ve never lived in Kansas.
Stranger
People in Kansas belive telling your kids about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny will turn them into criminals?
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1033/1033_01.asp?wpc=1033_01.asp&wpp=b
Awesome!
Oh, they’re real. But I think you’re asking if they are serious. Yes, they are.
I have the evolution one somewhere in my old junk. A friend of mine once thought they were great for evangelizing. And he was serious, too.
Oh I know a lot of nut jobs take them seriously. I’m just wondering if the guy who writes them is serious in the same way that Steve Colbert is serious.
I know management types who take Dilbert fairly seriosly. Apparenty it’s rather accurate.
And I don’t doubt people take Chick tracts seriously. Makes no sense but people believe the stangest thing. Like that us athiests have never heard of Jesus
THANK YOU. I thought I was the only one who has always suspected that “Jack Chick” is secretly yanking our chains. I mean, come on, those tracts are just SO goofy and ridiculous, I can definitely picture someone writing them tongue-in-cheek. Another thing that makes me wonder about him is that he is so reclusive (according to the wikipedia entry about him). If he was serious, I would think that he would want to commune with like-minded evangelists instead of hiding out where they can’t bother him. 
Dude, it’s like stepping through the fucking looking glass. I’m not saying everyone is like that (and Lawrence is quite a nice little bastion of sensibility in a sea of ignorance and superstition) but there is a lot of high weirdness going on in the Flat Brown Rectangular states that even Ivan Stang can’t top.
At a previous job, we once had several memos sent out by various members of managment, each clarifying the company policy on the display of cartoons and personal artifacts (specifically mentioning Dilbert) which culimated in a company-wide meeting of the the white collar staff in which we were told that no cartoons of any kind could be displayed, and only a very limited number (three, as I recall) of pictures of immediate relatives (not girlfriends or pets) could be visible on desks. This was between RIF #2 and #3 (where I bagged it) and the company is no longer in business except as a “brand label” for a former competitor. These guys might as well been reading Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook for all of their machinations and attempts to rationalize their decisions as anything but rearranging the chairs on the deck while the ship sinks.
Stranger
This is a country where people see a salt stain under an overpass and think it’s a holy image. This is a country where an entire good sized family gets into a car stark naked and drives to Louisiana because God told them to ( A cop at the scene, “I don’t believe it. God would never tell anyone to go to Louisiana” ). There’s no limit to the over the topness and stupidity of the true believers.
Bloody hell, I was getting Chick tracts at the Penty church I went to as a 4th grader in 1975. That’s a long time to maintain a satire without cracking. (Why, yes, I am an atheist now, thanks for asking!)
I used to collect Chick tracts as a disaffected teen back around 1980. The internet’s taken the thrill out of it, though I still like seeing a tract in the wild, so to speak. I got a bunch of them from a group of fundamentalists trying to save New York city.
I’m not doing a search, but I read a brief report from someone who interviewed Chick. He is completely serious.
The first one I got was the Dungeons and Dragons one, about 25 years ago when I was 13. Didn’t believe what it said then, certainly don’t believe it now.
I used to get them as Halloween “treats” when I was a kid. Pissed me off to no end then - I collect them, now. Part of my rule in collecting Chick tracts is that I must get them through a witnessing attempt. 95% of my collection is from “passive” attempts - left out at the library, that sort of thing. They are very hard to find in that fashion here in SoCal, but they do turn up on occasion.
Missed the edit window: I meant to add, I went to a Christian school and Chick tracts were pushed on us kids to be used as witnessing tools against the public school kids, those demons. :rolleyes: I always hated the push to Christianize other kids, even if they were just the “wrong” Christianity. My parents put me in that school because of the academics, but I ended up getting in a bit of trouble with the principal over my love of dinosaurs and for bringing in “Donald in Mathmagic Land” to watch at school (it shows the Venus Di Milo which was deemed “pornographic” by the kid of the school founders - yeah, I was unpopular).
I am happy to say that I was skeptical then and encouraged by my parents to be so, but happily we moved away and I never had to go again.
Funny that you posted this on the same day I posted to complain about what I perceived as a declin in quality of this category of fine literature.
I almost feel sorry for a guy who used to give these things out at my workplace…
I work for the post office, and this bloke was a truck driver. A fundamentalist Christian (we used to joke he’d measure truck journeys not in miles but in Hail Marys [or maybe something a bit less RC]), but also a nice, friendly guy. He’d give us Chick tracts. This was about fifteen years ago, and I was a bit younger, a bit more of a stoner, and a bit less serious at the time. Most people would awkwardly refuse the tracts when this guy offered them, but my friend and I always took them, and not only that, but we’d come up and ask for the things.
The truck driver stopped giving them to us when he began to suspect we were only reading them for their comedic value. He also seemed rather hurt. So on one hand I feel a bit bad about it, but on the other hand, I reckon being one of the few people who couldn’t get a Chick tract even by asking for one is pretty cool. 
No limit, too, to that of their counterparts on the other side.
Someone left a little leaflet in church the other day. I read it and then saw that it was a Chick Track. I had heard about them for so long and finally, finally! saw one in real life.
I know. I need to get out more.
Chick tracts are less plentiful than they used to be. Before Chick’s anti-Catholic obsession started in the mid-70s, they would be handed out by “moderate” Evangelicals as well as fringe Fundies. Then Chick got with John “Illuminati Grand
Druid” Todd, Alberto “Ex-Jesuit” Rivera, and Dr Rebecca “Witch-Fighter” Brown and his body of work went nuts. He revised some of better old tracts to include their nonsense (the Beast had been pictured in a business suit, then was revised to be in Papal robes, and recently has been pictured as the Jesuit General with the Pope as his False Prophet.)
while i have to say that the textual content is as whacked out as ever…
DEAR GOD! (fully irony mode), the artwork SUCKS!
i mean, really! really! SUCKS.
that was the one semi-decent thing those little pieces of crap had going for them, back in the day – the artwork wasn’t half-bad. now it looks like the drawings are being farmed out to 3rd graders.