There was one attempt to find him and interview him. I think they did get a hold of him and found him to be unassuming and nice. He was just really private and uninterested in fame of any kind.
If his tracts weren’t so funny/interesting, no one would have heard of him and would only be remembered by people like me who saw them a lot in the 80’s.
If I were to believe in a god, I think this is the sort I mind be inclined toward.
It’s a kind and generous thought, whatever.
No, Chick got his start drawing a one-panel cartoon called The Times Are Changing?, which was similar to BC, only earlier and not as good.
He’s never worked for Archie, which didn’t really have a house style until Dan DeCarlo started working there, several years after Chick got his start (and Chick’s art has never really looked like DeCarlo’s or Bob Montana’s, to begin with).
About time. Call me crass, but I won’t be mourning his passing.
Strange, apparently two different people wrote almost the exact same thing:
http://www.meh.ro/2011/05/05/why-were-here/
Though, this one is far more grammatical.
I wasn’t really in the mood for politics tonight. Honestly, I just wanted to have a glass of cognac while burning logs on a fire pit.
If I throw a handful of leaves on that… and they burst into flame, I’ll be thinking of you in your Lake of Fire, Jack Chick.
Say, before you burn up, any chance Lightbulb-God-Satan will shove every piece of candy you and your hateful sheep followers ever screwed a little kid in costume out of up your ignorant hateful ass?
And you didn’t do it? You disobeyed your Dungeon Master? That’s unforgivable.
Age 92. The good die young.
I am certainly not among the people that rejoice in his passing. He had his own, special kind of talent that may never be replaced. I always loved reading his Chick Tracks even though I am not a comic book fan because I found them so entertaining. His worldview and wacky form of fundamentalist Christianity were so different than almost anyone else’s that they were hilarious rather than threatening.
Think about it. It is amazing that one mostly anonymous man was able to draw bizarre comic pamphlets with bizarre story lines for over 40 years and blanket the country with them while never preaching publicly or even giving interviews. He was was of the most famous, mostly anonymous people ever.
Most flash-in-the-pan celebrities go for the quick payoff like a reality show or millions of Youtube followers that will drop off in a few months to years. He didn’t have anything like that to work with so he did it the hard way. He just sat down and drew cartoons that told people the different ways they would end up in Hell!!!l and had them distributed to almost every place in America for decades at a time. That is an extremely impressive logistical and endurance feat if nothing else.
Few people even know what he looks like yet his death made the top of the news just like a celebrity. His medium wasn’t film, TV or even radio however. It was just simple cartoons denouncing Satan, the Catholic church, Halloween and anything wasn’t in the King James version of the Bible (any other Bible was put there by Satan in his opinion).
My first Chick Tract was "Big Daddy"–found on a table in a rest stop outside of Barstow on my way to go camping in the Mojave. I took it to be a mini-underground comic of some type and didn’t give it much more thought. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that Jack’s Tracts were more than just indie comics. I was never bothered by them one way or another–I just felt they were little bits of folk art that I might find on a table somewhere on a road trip.
Me neither. If it wasn’t all an act, his reality was a terrifying place and based on the harm he helped foster I was ok with him living in it.
I failed Satan. I can never recover from the shame.
He also stayed a private person because he was afraid of a Jesuit hit squad.
I enjoyed his comics, but then I grew up in a secular country where few people would take them seriously.
Elsewhere they would have done a lot to spread and reinforce ignorance, fear and bigotry.
For his sake I hope there is an afterlife, and it’s just like in all of his chick tracts but minus the last few panels. So it’s everylasting games of dungeons and dragons played by gay catholics on halloween. Haw, haw, haw!
Not to mention crowds of atheists/Catholics/Muslims/etc. perspiring heavily and thinking “What if he’s right??”
Who isn’t?
Did he say that? I would not be surprised if you are serious.
Between a stint waiting tables at Cracker Barrel and all the years when most of my time was spent in hospitals, my collection of Chick tracts was almost complete at one time. (Someone at the hospital where I did residency liked to leave them on the code carts. Too late, man.)
Oddly enough, the last one I found in the wild was not at the rural Appalachian hospital where I work now, but on a sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights.
I found one this summer in an outhouse in the Rocky Mountains, my first spotting of a wild Chick tract since University. I don’t think anyone put it in that outhouse, rather outhouses are the source.
[del]Too soon[/del] Not soon enough.