Yesterday one of our customers left many Chick tracts throughout the supermarket in which I work. We had a merry time collecting them. I was able to add three new (to me) titles to my collection:
Unloved
The Present
The Warning
Envy me.
(I know that mention of Chick tracts usually go in the Pit, really, I do. It seems more MPSIMSish than Pit worthy, though)
I’ve occasionally seen them on the tables around the restaurants in a small mall in the parking garage across the street. It is somehow more interesting finding them in the wild than on the web.
Hee! Back in the late 70s I came into possession of a ton o’ Chick tracts. I used to love leaving them on friends front doors with little messages like: “Give me a call about what you’re doing this weekend, unless you’ve decided to roast in the eternal pits of HELL!” and “Call me. Signed, A friend concerned about the fact that you are doomed to eternal damnnation cause you are such a heathen!.”
Ah…then I would assume that my earlier assumption that these were about some form of modernised feminism in which women felt empowered to refer to themselves as “chicks” to be incorrect, then?
http://www.chick.com/default.asp
Cartoon booklets to “make witnessing easy”. Little morality plays in comic form to try to sway the reader towards Jack Chick’s form of fundamental Christianity.
I think the goal is to leave them in public places, so one can “witness” without actually being there to face confrontation and counter-arguments.
I used to love collecting Chick tracts back in college in the late '90s, when severe old men in old-fashioned suits would hand them out on campus. We had our fair share of traveling fire-and-brimstone campus preachers who would harangue innocent passersby and get into screaming debates with the more open-minded student body, but these guys were just happy to hand out Chick tracts and church flyers. I enjoyed reading them on an ironic level, and I still have around 20 or so. If the OP or anyone else wants them, I’d happily mail them to a collector.
I always enjoy reviewing Chick tracts, and my critique of the Art Institute Escapade may be found here.
I stumbled upon one of the very first tracts, This is Your Life, as a freshman in college in 1978. I carried it back to my dorm and we all gawked at it like monkeys examining a rubber ball. Fire-and-brimstone preaching wasn’t new to us, even then, but that tract was still special–it was so flamboyant and self-assured. Not until 25 years later, when I read people talking about Chick on this Board, did I realize I had seen the progenitor of the whole series so long ago.
I work for a newsletter publisher. We send out sample issues and order forms with postage-paid return envelopes. Part of my job is sorting through the mail, opening envelopes and processing orders. People send all kinds of things back in the return envelopes: porn, coupons, their other junk mail, torn up order forms, and Chick tracts.
I dream of a day when the president of the company realizes that it’s not good business practice to contantly harrass customers, and customers realize that thier energy would be better spent writing “Remove from mailing list” on the order forms and sending them back whole. [/rant]