Oh, goodie! I can’t wait!! It’s like driving past a car wreck…you know you shouldn’t look, but you can’t help yourself.
I worked retail in the South from 1999 to 2002 and would occasionally get tracts from customers but never read them. I’m assuming some of them were Chick ones but I don’t know.
It wasn’t until I came here and saw the threads devoted to him in the Pit that I ever realized how inflammatory and bigoted they were and am glad I always ignored them. Even now, I generally don’t read threads about him because I just don’t want to have to put up with that bile and venom.
People used to stand just outside of my (public) middle school and pass these out in the morning, along with those little orange biblical excerpts or whatever those were. Everyone wanted them, we’d make fun of them until about second period and then youd find them in the toilets and whatnot.
I should add that until now I had no idea who Jack Chick was, or that he was behind these. I remember the biggest one was about the rapture. It had comparisons of like a Godly child and an Ungodly child and then Jesus came back…
:dubious: Do you mean “Bob”? It doesn’t sound like you truly “know” “Bob” :dubious:
Grade school- late 60’s, a friend (normal Presbyterian non-fundist) had HOLY JOE, CREATOR OR LIAR, THIS WAS YOUR LIFE, THE BEAST and a couple of the other originals. I was Christian but essentially unchurched (the family was Christmas-Easter Catholic) & kinda disturbed by them. I was totally freaked out by BEWITCHED? in which a hippy chick into drugs & occultism has a bad trip & sees her face melt (the hallucinations being caused by demons who are trying to get her to kill herself)- finally her praying Christian Grandma gets to the hospital in time to lead Hippy Chick to Christ before she dies.
When our family got into church, tho our church didn’t use Chick tracts, I did understand the message more. We were Christian & Missionary Alliance, which is moderate fund’ist. I myself did start collecting them & used them as witnessing tools to my classmates, but stopped when the anti-Catholic “Alberto” materials came out in the late 1970’s.
I found one when I was about 20 or so, being sold by a sweet-looking Mennonite woman at a charming craft stand at the Green Dragon Market in Ephrata, PA. My Mom tried to berate her for selling them but the woman smiled at her and said she (Mom) was being deluded by Satan. Changed my view of the Plain People forever, I must say.
Only time I’ve seen them since in the wild was at a Korean deli in midtown Manhattan. As soon as I saw them I put the sandwich I’d had made on the counter, turned on my hell, and walked out.
Otherwise, I only talk about them here.
Wow, what a slip! My heel!! Heel!
BTW, I’m Catholic and showed the one my Mom got to a priest friend of ours. He was amazed to see that crap was still around.
I went to a Fund’ist Baptist school for a couple of years, so I had the occasional encounter. I remember finding one of the nastier anti-Catholic ones on my desk once. I had been baptized as a child and considered myself nominally Catholic even though I had never been to a Catholic church except to attend the odd wedding, but a guest speaker in the daily chapel service had gone off on an anti-Catholic rant. I bit my tongue, but I guess someone noticed the look on my face. I was extremely impressionalble and gullible as a teenager, so the tract was enough to cause me to renounce Catholicism for a good long while… (I’m actively practicing now).
I have a love-hate relationship with the things. On one hand, to a non-religious person, they have tremendous comedic entertainment value, and I must admit there is a part of me that finds them quite amusing. OTOH, if you are a person of faith of the non Fund’ist Chrixtian variety, the hate and the deliberate lies and misinformation can make you feel alternately sad and very, very angry.
I got my start with Dark Dungeons; I think I found it online somehow during my gaming days. My first paper track was given to me when I was hanging out with friends in Royal Oak as we were leaving a sex toy shop - I don’t know who they thought they were going to save, but at least they weren’t going for the easy targets. They’re awful, ignorant, hateful screeds, but I love 'em anyway. They’re just so funny.
Haw Haw Haw!
I read all of them back in the 1970’s when I was a kid in an extremely religious home. He also had a full-size comic book series called “The Crusaders” with a former Green Beret and a former Black Panther-type dude going around the world kickin’ ass for Jesus! How I ate that shit up! I was amazed that he’s still around, which I found out after lurking around the SDMB.
I didn’t know what they were until I saw them mentioned here and googled them.
I’ve got to get out more often …
Some internet message board, but not the SDMB. Maybe Customers Suck? I don’t know. I’ve never seen one in the wild-the only tracts were vague poetry type things that just talked about how good Jesus was. THOSE I always seemed to find in the lady’s restroom at Kmart.
I sometimes wonder if the majority of his sales come from people like us, who find them hysterical, rather than actually taking them seriously.
Very late '70s early '80s, standing in line for Rocky Horror, Jesus Freaks handed them to me.
i heard of him first at an anime convention. a guy named dave merril was showing a chick flick based on the tract with the “christian” rock band and some old dude came up at the end of it to tell us ALL rock music was satans tool… never laughed so hard
I’m with the OP- outside of the SDMB, I’ve never seen or heard Jack Chick’s name mentioned anywhere.
When I was growing up, our church had a rack of Chick tracts free for the taking. I read all of them that were out at that time. I was 10 years old… not proud to say that I formed a lot of beliefs about the world from those “scholarly” works. I didn’t know Chick by name until a couple of years ago I stumbled across the Chick tracts online last year.
For years I thought the peace sign was really a satanic symbol, that ecumenical churches were an atheist plot, etc. Fucked me up for a while.
I think the stuff is poison and I think it has influenced attitudes and beliefs in the US more than many people know. I don’t wish death on anyone, but it will be a good day when the Chick factory is out of business.
I’ve seen all kinds of tracts left in public bathrooms - I guess the distributors figure when you’re just sitting in a stall, you’ll read anything. I flipped through a couple and found myself more offended than amused. Someone at the last place I worked used to leave them on the shelves above the sinks. I just tossed them into the trash, figuring I was doing a service to my coworkers.
Anyway, based on that exposure and reading the threads here, I made the connection. I still find them sickening, if hilarious in an out-of-touch-with-reality sort of way.
One of my husband’s aunts always slips a few tracts into our Christmas card - the only time we hear from them - but they’re all single-sheet, tiny print tracts rather than comic books. Mostly harmless, and always discarded unread.
snort Do you honestly believe that they’ll stop publishing tracts when Jack dies?
Heaven help us all, yes, there are such…fellows.
:rolleyes:
And no, he isn’t a comic genius. He believes every word of the insanity he babbles in print. :smack: