I was raised a Southern Baptist (we don’t have sex standing up because people might think we’re dancing! (I kill me)).
Anyway, it didn’t “take”, except I can make killer Jell-o salads 
I was about 12 or 14 when I saw my first Chick tract. Had no idea who he was until I stumbled on his website a few years ago. I even now know the NAME of the tract I saw - “Somebody Goofed”. It freaked me out for years.
VCNJ~
I don’t know Jack Chick.
(Heheh. Been waiting awhile to say that one.)
I was doing research into the “dark past” of D&D after I started playing and ran across his Dark Dungeon one. I can’t read too many or I start to foam at the mouth.
Errr, not up here you wouldn’t. I was born in New York City, grew up mostly north of there in upstate New York, and went to college in Buffalo. I’ve lived in the greater Boston area for 17 years now and never saw or heard of Jack Chick until I started frequenting this board.
I’d always assumed it was a Bible Belt thing (never been there so can’t say), but from the posts in this thread distribution seems to be more…complex.
The mother of one of my kids mates surreptiously left two tracts for my perusal one day when she came to pick her kid up (about 5 years ago).
It’s interesting that her darling son is now an unemployed drug-addicted, gambling-addicted petty crim…I don’t think her hard-line, fundy, parenting technique did much good in this instance. 
I’d never seen one before the SDMB, but when I started asking my churchgoing friends about him, many told me that they’d seen them frequently while growing up.
Most of them went to evangelical churches in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin while growing up.
Some people I know have reported finding them shoved on the shelves at Wal-Mart, but I never have.
I had never heard of Chick tracts until I went to the University of Florida, where I’d sometimes find them laying around campus, often in bathrooms or on buses. As a comic book collector, I couldn’t help picking them up, since the ridiculous tone and generally mean worldview was unintentionally funny. Haw haw haw!
UF had several on-campus preachers, usually of the “wack-a-loon” variety, who verbally lambasted passers-by, spewing fire and brimstone and calling innocent college girls “whores.” Occasionally the loud preachers would be flanked by older gentlemen who wore suits, carried giant signs with fundamentalist messages, and generally comported themselves better, and those guys often carried boxes of different Chick tracts. After a while, I’d go up to them and asked which different ones they had. I never led them on and said I was interested in their messages, but I said I enjoyed reading the comics (which wasn’t far from the truth).
I now have a meager collection of 17 Chick tracts (I had more a few moves back), and I’d happily mail them to any Doper who was interested in reading or collecting them. Seriously, anyone who is curious, just say the word and I’ll send them your way. Preferably in the U.S., so I can pick up the postage.
I got my first Chick tract when I was a kid attending the Cuyahoga County Fair in Ohio. There was a tent with little peep show displays out front, such as “The Headline You Will Never See” (which turned out to be “Your Own Death”, with the article “illustrated” by your reflection in a mirror) and “Billions of Protozoa in this Bowl” (the message was that like souls, the microscopic organisms definitely exist – even if you can’t see them, God can!) As I was checking out the exhibit, a woman approached me and asked if I had studied protozoa in school.
Before I really knew what was happening, she had lured me into the tent and begun doing her damnedest, so to speak, to convert me. Since I just wanted to get out of there and get back to the fun parts of the fair (rides, animals, freak shows, etc.), I played along and asked Jesus to save my soul (though I also remember, in response to the woman’s saying that I should pray out loud instead of silently, asking such smart-alecky questions as “What if you’re mute? Do your silent prayers count then?”).
When I had “converted” to her satisfaction, she presented me with what I now know to be a Chick tract. I forget which one it was, but do remember that the standard THE BIBLE SAYS THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO HEAVEN! box appeared on the last page. I learned the name of Jack Chick when my brother Mark began following the (in his words) “wonderful world of Christians and Christian television just to see what those born-agains are up to”. He would occasionally rant about the latest Chick tract he’d found on the bus or picked up off the street.
Hahaha! You must mean the Reverend Jed Smock & his righteous wife, the former disco queen Cindy! Those two were around in 1979-1983 when I attended. I wonder if they’re still banging those bibles around Gainesville?
VCNJ~
BROTHER JED! Yeah, he and his crazy wife were still around, at least in the late '90s. I attended UF on and off between 1996 and 2003 (college and law school), but at least for the first few years, we knew we’d be in for some surreal, scary comedy when Brother Jed showed up in the Plaza of the Americas.
I was introduced by a (gay, atheist) friend in college, about seven years ago. Jack Chick had a bit of an ironic following on my old campus, inspiring a few T-shirts and such, but it was news to me that anybody took him seriously until I discovered the SDMB.