Check the laundromats in Concord and Keene.
At the Alternative Press Expo in San Fancisco I ran into the author of the not flattering “World of Chick”
The conclusion of the author was that Chick is real indeed, the early comics were made by him, but he later hired other artists to continue his “task”.
He is also a collector-trader of classic tracts and also was selling parody tracts!
The best was “The Other People” by Pathfinder Press Publications.
“Our Pagan tracts really get read by EVERYONE!”
I noticed a lack of completely nonreligious or scientific anti-Chick tracts, so once I get my life on track, count me as one that will help to get your project running.
Count me in as someone who’s interested in helping out! I’ve had family members hand me Chick tracts in an effort to “help me.” :rolleyes: Can’t draw, but I can sort of write, and I might be able to help with webspace.
Heh, just had an idea for a tract, which could be a pro-literacy/education kind of thing. Two characters are standing around, one of them complains that he’s thirsty and is about to drink a bottle of blue solvent. The other one points out that the label clearly says, “Solvent” to which the first one responds by saying it’s Pepsi Blue, since it’s blue in color. There’s a bit of banter back and forth between the two of them, and then the first one drinks the solvent and dies. (Admittedly, not much different than if he’d drank a bottle of Pepsi Blue, but you get the idea.) I think that it’s important to show bad things will happen to you if you’re stupid.
The big, critical things we need right now are as follows:
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Artists. (I think this is the big bottleneck at this point.)
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Researchers. Specifically, someone willing to try to catalogue a good list of outright, provable lies from Chick, or someone willing to look into incidents of exorcisms gone wrong, etc. If you look at the tract ideas we discuss above, you’ll see what’s needed.
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Web space. The tracts will be big graphics files, and my web storage space might get filled up quickly.
Writers are good, too, but for the moment I think we’re doing ok. (If nothing else, I can script the tracts myself, so the project won’t die for lack of writers.) At the moment, I think we have enough scripts to keep the artists busy. If anyone wants to try a hand at scripting one, let us know in this thread what you’re doing, and we can make suggestions. (I know that my own script ideas were enormously enhanced by the discussion here.)
Right now I’m actively working on one entitled “I never knew HE was an atheist!” (or “unbeliever,” I haven’t decided yet.) It’s about celebrity atheists/agnostics/etc, with the idea being to dispel the stereotype that all atheists are like O’Hair.
I’m also planning to make one out of “Life in Our Anti-Christian America.” Like the celebrity atheist tract, it’s one which can be made using clip art, rather than drawing. (I can draw semi-ok, but I don’t really think I’m up to snuff to draw a comic quite yet.)
If anyone has ideas for things to include in the “Anti-Christian America” tract, let me know.
I have two more ideas for tracts, but they haven’t quite gelled yet.
One is named “Bluebeard’s Children,” which was inspired by a comment I saw on www.losingmyreligion.com about how no one would call a father loving if he threw his children in an oven. The tract would have Bluebeard threatening to throw his children in an oven if they didn’t say “I love you” with precisely the right phrasing, and justifying his actions on the grounds that without him they wouldn’t exist, etc.
The other is named “Life without Santa.” It has two kids sitting on the ground playing with toys, and one expresses doubts about Santa Claus. It’s not meant to ridicule Christianity, but to dispel the usual stereotypes about atheism. I.e., people won’t be moral without a threat of hell, morality has no meaning without God, life is meaningless without God (“You mean it’s just my parents giving me presents because they love me? HOW CAN I GO ON LIVING?!?!?”)
What sort of tracts would you like to see?
And while we’re at it, what does your screen name mean? 
**
Thanks!
I think that’s a good idea, but I think we need to debate first the reasons behind illiteracy and dropouts. That’s a GD thread in and of itself! But as an example, I think we would want to stress that in America you’re told that if you work hard, that’s the secret of success- so kids drop out of high school and work at McDonald’s, thinking that the way to be successful is to get a head start on hard work.
Sorry Ben, I did not reply to this early because I was on the road.
The kind of tracts I would like to see would be similar to the educational (and funny!) comics Larry Gonick makes, he had a comic section on Discovery magazine and is the creator of the Cartoon Guide to the Universe. The idea IMO is to make them more fun than preachy, the “for further reading” serious stuff should be put in links at the end of the tracts.
As for my name: it is in part a silly reference to Ghostbusters but changed it to mean that I like to bust information that is garbage. (Garbage In, Garbage Out).
In reference to your needs, I have cartooning and art experience and I am developing my own comic.
Right now I am busy looking for another job, but I will show you some of my work in a few weeks (New web site is taking some time also) or sooner, if you contact me.
I’ve finished the first anti-ignorance tract, which is available on my webpage:
http://psyche11.home.mindspring.com/ben/WritingIndex.htm
I haven’t printed it out yet, but I don’t expect it will look very different in hardcopy. I do know, however, that the folding scheme works. Fold along the gray lines between frames, and fold the horizontal lines first, to make an accordion. Then fold the accordion in half along the vertical line, and you should end up with the front and back covers in place. (The front cover is upside-down so that when someone opens the tract, the front page will be rightside-up in front of them.)
This one looked pretty good. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but I just couldn’t let this pass by without comment.
Did you consider, ** lekatt ** that the problem isn’t the teaching of evolution, but disinterested parents who neglect to teach their children ethics or morals?
If a child has a good ethical basis from his teachings in the home, I doubt sincerely if the theory of evolution can destroy it. To say that it can is to imbue evolutionary teaching with an almost witchy power of involuntary transformation. Nor does the teaching of creationism have the power to transform. It is the height of the ridiculous to assume that it does.
Thanks! My next project will probably be “Life in Anti-Christian America” (another one I can do with clip art.)
Unfortunately, “I never knew HE was an atheist!” didn’t have so much opportunity for humor, although humor really wasn’t the point so much as having interesting quotes and surprising revelations about who was an atheist. (I admit that I was really surprised by Ray Romano.) I was proud of the Naughty Squid, though. The original idea was to have a little Christopher Reeve head poking out from behind the “CENSORED” bar, shouting “Up, up, and away!” but it ended up so small as to be unrecognizable. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it would be entirely appropriate. (Not that Chick ever let that stop him…)
SPOOFE, are you around? I tried to contact you by email to send you the template, but I couldn’t get through.
Sorry to start my own semi-hijack, but I’ve just gotta mention that I didn’t look at the spoof tracts until I read the responses from His4Ever and lekatt. Their replies were so emotional I found myself unable to do anything but scroll back up, and click the links that set them off. I guess I should thank them both, as what I found was fairly amusing, as spoofs go. I wouldn’t have spent the time had the disgust not been so passionate.
Of course, some of the basic rights, lekatt, that your friends died fighting for include the right to be free from governmental meddling in religion (which has nothing to do with other citizens trying to impose their religious beliefs on their peers - witness the legal door-to-door missionaries), and also the right to free speech, which includes the right to ridicule ideas that people find silly (without fear of punishment from the government).
In other words, lekatt, your call for the government to pass laws to ban the stuff which you define as “hate” (while in fact, many of the spoof tracts actually call for more tolerance and inclusion than the tracts they spoof) is tantamount to a wish to revoke the freedoms which your friends died fighting for. Your prayed-for laws would, instead, impose a morality which not everyone would agree with (good-bye freedom of religion), and eliminate a large part of the right to free speech (by mandating that people can only say nice things about or to one another).
Would you enjoy being fined or jailed for calling a bunch of satire “hate tracts,” as you did above? That comment was pretty obviously motivated by hatred, itself, considering the venom which dripped from every word.
What would your friends have died for, if such laws were enacted?
Ben, I think you need to put “tracts which explain the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (especially the First Amendment)” on your “to-do” list.