Note: I am NOT pitting the views of the publications mentioned–only observing the fundamentalist mini-comic publishing phenomenon. (or whatever you want to call it)
Years and years ago, I came across a teensy (3" x 5") comic at a rest area outside of Barstow. “Big Daddy?” told the true facts about evolution…according to the Gospel. I got a kick out of reading it, but never gave it another thought.
Fast forward to September 2008, and I’m in the bookstore of a remote State Park in Northern California. I open a book about hydraulic gold mining, and out falls a teensy comic, “Doom Town”. Hey, I’ve seen these before! This small graphic novel (?) provided amusing reading as well.
I discovered that Jack Chick has a publishing empire (?) devoted to things like this. It blows my mind that people buy packets of these little comics and distribute them to the far-flung corners of America. I see that there are even websites with parodies of their stories.
Have you seen Jack Chick’s handiwork in your travels?
Yeah, not to be snarky or anything, but how exactly have you been here for this long and missed all mention of Chick tracts? I kind of envy that you went this long without having to have their existence imprinted on your brain.
ETA: Just looked at Doom Town. Either Jack’s hired a ghost cartoonist, or he somehow got much better at drawing and shading. I was actually kind of impressed with the quality of the art.
Although the “savior” in the story does look like a pedophile what with that “pederstache” and all. Plus, it’s pretty funny how Chick glosses over the fact that Lot offering up his virgin daughters to a mob is supposed to be a good thing.
I guess it’s because I rarely read any of the religious debate/pit threads. I’m certainly aware that fervent fundamentalism stirs up heated discussions here (and everywhere else), but I don’t participate. I was just trying to express my interest in the mini-comics as artifacts that I came across, and that Chick-ites were leaving them in surprising places.
I most commonly ran across them in the wild, so to speak, as a kid. They were often disseminated in lieu of candy on Halloween. It’s really no wonder I soured on religion at such a young age.
My husband and I casually collect tracts we find now. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a wild one.
I’d rather post my comments in the Pit, but this not being in the Pit, I’ll keep it rule-friendly.
When I was in the 9th grade, I had a teacher (public school no less) who passed out Chick tracts to us. That was the first contact I’d had with them, and they scared the shit out of me. I actually prayed just like the tract said to, and when I didn’t feel the thunderbolt of Jesus’s hand punching me in the heart, saving me, I pretty much gave up on the whole schmeer.
It didn’t help that one of my friends at the time was the son of a born again street evangelist, and the son (my friend) would ask people upon first meeting them, “If you died right now, where would you go? Heaven or hell?”
Incidentally, I grew up near a Baptist church, and saw firsthand the hypocrisy of the people there, but that’s all I’ll say about that here. Suffice to say all that (and influence from my father as well) turned me away from religion, and toward skepticism and the ideas of science.
All this was in 1976, so I’ve had some long familiarity with Chick tracts.
It’s no mystery at all. Fred Carter, who is also a pastor and is black (Chick may be a bigot in many areas, but not racially), has been openly acknowledged as the provider of the quality art. In fact, in the past few years, they put together a lush assortment of oil stills into a narrated DVD overview of the Bible called “The Light of the World”.
Like Queen Bruin, I got them in lieu of candy from a few places at Halloween when I was a kid. This one was the one I still remember, all these years later. I must have been around ten years old and I remember my response was absolute horror. Not terror over not being saved (I’d already been told I was at Sunday school), but the idea that God could be so cold-blooded as to give a clearly misguided man no second chance. The poor guy was never given any reason to believe in God except for an old lady’s nagging, and when he’s finally given the proof of God’s existence he’s thrown into a lake of fire! The disgust such a concept inspired in me stuck with me for life.
I think I got one of the anti-Mormon ones at one point, which couldn’t have possibly made those people popular with their neighbors, as there were tons of Latter Day Saints in my hometown. My Mormon friends never said anything about them, so maybe their parents took them away before they could read them.
Since then, I’ve found one in a bathroom at college and one in a used book store, stuck between the pages of a book. Those have been my only experiences with them in the “wild”, though when I was running our family restaurant my sister was once tipped with a fake fifty dollar bill that had a little witnessing statement on one side of it. Not nearly as entertaining and far, far more alienating.
Sorry, I actually wallow in Chickian stuff and almost thought the fact that Chick had an associate artist was common knowledge.
Btw, the name of that artist is
