Difference between revisions of "Jack Chick"

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[[Category: Christians]]
 
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[[Category: Fundamentalist Christians]]

Revision as of 16:52, 17 February 2009

This panel from a Chick Tract makes even less sense in context.
(It really does, I checked.)

Jack Chick is an American Christian fundamentalist well known for Chick Publications. His tracts cover various aspects of the Christian faith, including the principles of tolerance and love as well as the Catholics' satanist conspiracy to overthrow God's reign on earth or something.[1] His claims about the Jesuits, for instance, include that they were responsible for the creation of the Qur'an, that they controlled the Gestapo and were responsible for the holocaust, and that all this is being deliberately withheld from the American people because of the influence of the Catholic Church on the media.

Tracts

Chick publishes small tracts in comic book style as well as full size comic books. Most of his full size comic books are part of the Crusader series. The smaller tracts are sold cheaply in bulk for you to leave everywhere you go in phone booths, tables, laundromats, school lockers, car windshields, etc., which is also known as littering. The larger comics featured a heavy dose of sensationalist Satanic Panic and demonic possession themes until around 1980 when Chick discovered King James Only and anti-Catholicism and published several more Crusader comics blaming the Catholic Church for everything from the Communists to Satanism and human sacrifice to the American Civil War to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the Holocaust (also the fault of the evolutionists). Whatever.

Chick writes all of his tracts, although some draw heavily from other like-minded sources. Chick also drew some, particularly the older tracts, but many have been drawn by others. Fred Carter is the usual other artist — you can spot Carter's work by the realism in contrast to Chick's cartoony style, and by the blatant homo-erotica in just about every one of Carter's tracts.

Jack Chick likes to portray sinners as very hairy, smelly, and repulsive. This one looks like it was probably drawn by Fred Carter.

Content

Most of his work follows a standard formula generally involving a highly caricatured straw man version of an Atheist, homosexual or some other "sinner", often with "stereotypically Jewish" features, or a person who is completely ignorant of the basic tenets of Christianity despite living in the western world who then gets pwned by a clean-cut white kid who just fell out of pretty much any 1950s sitcom. The sinner then either repents, generally losing whatever worldly position they had as a result, or fails to and ends up in the Lake of Fire, while the little WASP kid goes on to eternal salvation. Occasionally he presents a "historical" tract, but the aforementioned crackers (whoops!) characters are still often used to introduce the story/rant.

The dialogue in his tracts often lapses into incoherent attempts at using street slang or sounding hip:

  • "Haw haw — hey guys, this is the dirtiest story I've ever heard!"[2]
  • "Adam blew it! Temptation came and we all went down the tubes."[3]
  • "The environment will go crazy."[4]
  • "Talk about dumb. That was it!" [5].
  • "Hey friend, remember all those things you told me? You were wrong — you goofed!"[6]

Additionally, Chick puts heavy emphasis on the importance of accepting the holy spirit in contrast to worldly actions such as charity, benevolence and hospitality, usually resulting in situations where the most noble and honorable fellows end up being flung to Hell for eternity, while murderers, rapists and other convicts are rewarded with entry to heaven,[7][8] or are miraculously allowed to live.[9]

Jack Chick also feels aroused by naked bodies being thrown to lakes of fire by angels.

Occasionally, the tracts will feature "spiritual warfare", where angels and demons manipulate real world events to battle over people's souls.[10] In an effort to stay biblically accurate, Chick draws Satan with stereotypical devil horns and a pitchfork. According to Chick, Satan's hobbies include murdering teenagers with chainsaws[11] and watching corny sitcoms[12]. Also, Satan knows very little about biblical prophecy.[13]

Most popular

The all time best seller of these is This Was Your Life, in which an upscale man of about mid-1960s vintage who looks like he is the epitome of Playboy Magazine's target audience dies and finds his entire life played back to him on judgment day. Adultery! Fornication! Foul language! Drinking! Disbelief in Jesus! God then casts this sinner into the Lake of Fire.

Sikhs, Satanists, North Koreans, Witches, Secularists and Anthropologists. They all want you dead.[14]

Jack Chick's sickest tract is arguably "Lisa", distributed in the mid-1990s. It is now unavailable in print and isn't on chick.com either, for some reason. However, the Scans Daily Livejournal community found a set of scans. You have to read this thing to believe it. Remember: raping your children is fine as long as you accept Jesus as your personal savior! And it only takes 10 minutes!

Oh, and the incredibly incoherent and paranoid The Last Generation features black helicopters, free drugs, torture, implanted microchips, a New Age teacher coming to public school dressed in something that looks like a cross between a wetsuit and a KKK uniform, a Soylent Green-like food supply scenario, and more! Not to be missed! Even for Jack Chick, this one is waaaay out there.

Prime Targets

Conspicuously missing from that list

  • Scientology. One would think he would have done an anti-Scientology tract by now, but surprise!, he has not. Oh well, it's probably a good thing, since he would most likely claim Scientology like everything else is an invention of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, it's quite odd he hasn't touched that subject at all.

Questionable source material

Jack Chick is notorious for using questionable "testimonies" as source material, and continues to publish his tracts and comics based on their fraudulent testimonies long after these people have been exposed as frauds:

Books and tapes

Jack Chick also publishes a bunch of books, some of them written by himself and some of them by other authors. He reprinted a bunch of old out of print anti-Catholic books by Avro Manhattan and Charles Chiniquy, two books allegedly about "Satanism" by Rebecca Brown, and is the main publisher of fringe anti-rock & roll crusader Jeff Godwin, who is so extreme he even thinks Christian rock is Satanic.

Chick's self-authored books include: The Next Step: For Growing Christians, The Last Call: A Revival Handbook, the anti-Catholic rant Smokescreens, and the long out of print collector's item A Solution To...The Marriage Mess. All the books by Chick are in the same cartoon style as his tracts and comic books.

He also released a few cassette tapes. One of them was "Let's Take A Stand", where you get to hear Jack Chick's actual voice rambling on about the "whore of Babylon". The other was "Closet Witches", featuring Rebecca Brown and "Elaine" exposing the witchcraft conspiracy to infiltrate your local First Baptist Church, and what good Christians can do to spot and root out these dangerous infiltrators.

Jack Chick gallery

  • An easy mistake to make.[14]

  • You're on candid camera. All the @!!!**!ing time.[31]

  • Margaret Thatcher proudly presents a gimp from space New Age Healer.[32]

  • The truth that science won't tell you: your heart actually looks like this. [33]

  • It turns out that Harry Potter is actually Satan.[13]

  • . . . And he really likes watching corny sixties sitcom Bewitched.[12]

  • . . . And running amok with a chainsaw and pumpkin mask.[11]

  • Angels use dirty tricks too.[10]

  • What really happened to the dinosaurs.[34]

  • Trust me! [35]

  • Can YOU feel it? [8]

  • Your MOTHER! [31]

  • All the hard times of old England.

External links

In this excellent video adaptation of a Chick tract, Jack T. Chick shows how you can be set free from homosexuality if you confess, with your mouth, the Lord Jesus.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Here He Comes!.
  2. ↑ This Was Your Life.
  3. ↑ Angel of Light.
  4. ↑ The Great Escape.
  5. ↑ That Old Devil, 1989, out of print.
  6. ↑ Somebody Goofed.
  7. ↑ Flight 144.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Gun Slinger.
  9. ↑ The Hit.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 The Assignment.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Boo!.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Bewitched
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Where Did They Go?.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Fairy Tales.
  15. ↑ Pretty much every tract you can get your hands on.
  16. ↑ Jews get some sort of mixed treatment, they usually receive compliments as God's chosen people and even thinks everything that has gone bad with a government was because they crossed the Jews, but also often are the only targets of blame for Jesus' crucifixion, and of course, they aren't chosen enough to escape God's wrath.
  17. ↑ The Death Cookie.
  18. ↑ Allah Had No Son.
  19. ↑ Birds And The Bees.
  20. ↑ Gladys.
  21. ↑ The Poor Little Witch.
  22. ↑ God With Us.
  23. ↑ Angels.
  24. ↑ Here Kitty Kitty!; The Trick; The Devil's Night.
  25. ↑ Dark Dungeons.
  26. ↑ The Nervous Witch.
  27. ↑ Dark Dungeons, 1984. Recent editions do not contain the line, "Gather up all your... occult books, including C.S. Lewis...".
  28. ↑ Who Murdered Clarice?.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Big Daddy?.
  30. ↑ Who Is He?.
  31. ↑ 31.0 31.1 The Execution.
  32. ↑ The Last Generation.
  33. ↑ Heart Trouble.
  34. ↑ There Go The Dinosaurs.
  35. ↑ Trust Me!.
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