Jack Chick



…one of God’s most infamous trolls. Jack Thomas Chick was an American cartoonist and the owner, manager, and editor of Chick Publications in southern California. Chick's publishing house is responsible for hundreds of abominable, illustrated evangelical gospel tracts known as Chick tracts, tiny comic books printed on cheap paper that are ubiquitous in subway stations, rest stop bathrooms, inside the dresser drawers of hotel rooms, and littered around other public places nationwide.

As a general rule, Chick tracts read like the ramblings of an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, homophobic, etc. fire-and-brimstone conspiracy theorist that makes Pat Robertson look sane and mellowed out in comparison. The tracts create an "us vs. them" mentality where those who accept the message are part of the righteous few and the rest are sinners in league with the Devil.

The cartoons are horrifying to children and teach them that they are always one worldly decision away from eternal damnation. Chick tracts also warn against making the "wrong" friends, following the "wrong" teachers, and reading the "wrong" books, etc., lest children fall for a trick by the Devil in disguise. All this serves to isolate Christian fundamentalists, "saved" from the rest of society.

Production
In truth, Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of American cartooning. Like the Nazi filmmaker who made Triumph of the Will, Chick was an artist of genuine skill who put his talent in the service of an odious ideology.

History
Chick began publishing tracts in the mid-1960s. His company publishes small tracts in comic book style as well as full-size comic books; his early tracts were published by Rusthoi Publications and were in a larger format than his current tracts. 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. (to non-fundamentalists, this is known as littering). The larger comics featured a heavy dose of sensationalist Satanic Panic and demonic possession.

Chick (ironically — or not) claimed to have been inspired by early Maoist propaganda cartoon booklets (lianhuanhua, or linked pictures) that were distributed throughout China in the 1960s.

Tracts
Chick wrote 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. (un-credited) is typically the other artist. Carter's work is easy to spot by its realism, heavy shading, and attention to detail, in contrast to Chick's more cartoony style. Carter's art frequently features less-than-subtle homoerotic themes and often bears striking similarities in both style and content to the gay S&M art of (i.e. a penchant for leather, hypermasculine men, and sexual menace).

Chick tracts are printed in-house by Chick Publications and once retailed for around 16 cents each. Bulk discounts are available, and a number of tracts, especially those printed in more obscure languages or ones that have gone out of print, are available only in bulk sales of 10,000 copies. Just about all of Chick's tracts are available for on-line reading, and were once available as apps for Android phones, presumably to show to others while proselytizing.

Chick's art is often extremely anti-Semitic, with evil characters often having large, stereotypical Jewish noses. The Death Cookie, an attack on the Catholic Church, featured stereotypically Jewish-looking characters, including a Jewish-looking Satan.

Chick also practiced other stereotyping in that many of his negative characters are overweight, and that virtually any overweight person in a Chick tract is bad. Thus overweight people join a large number of groups on Chick's bigotry hit parade.

Also, male villains are frequently balding with feeble comb-overs, while True Believers generally have full heads of hair.

Rumors persisted that Chick suffered a massive stroke in 1996. Of course, it's difficult to confirm this, given his overall reclusiveness. However, this rumor is not particularly unfounded; it does explain a few things, particularly the decline of art quality in Chick-drawn tracts and the apeshit crazier content of the later ones. (Those familiar with only the older tracts may wonder how this is possible. Trust us, some things are really infinite.)

Books and tapes
Jack Chick also published 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 published the Spanish edition of The Collapse of Evolution by Scott Huse and How Life Began by Thomas Heinze.

Chick's self-authored books include: The Next Step: For Growing Christians, The Last Call: A Revival Handbook, the anti-Catholic rant Smokescreens, and 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. Two of them are "Let's Take A Stand" and "Smokescreens", where you get to hear Chick's actual voice rambling on about the "whore of Babylon". Another cassette 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.

Chick published on his website an essay (in addition to many more works) by ex-Satanist/Witch/Mormon/Mason/Roman Catholic/Druid/Vampire/Ninja/Pirate William Schnoebelen, in which Schnoebelen explains why Dungeons and Dragons is demonic, and claims that the Necronomicon and Cthulhu mythos are both real.

Comic books
In addition to the tracts, Chick's company also produced full sized comic books, many under the Crusaders brand. A set of six comic books sensationalize Alberto Rivera's fairy tales. The Boolean Union Studios does an in-depth analysis on six of the comics so one can see a sampling just how off Planet Reality they were.

Other comics

 * Primal Man?: Typical creationist talking points.

Video
Chick produced only one evangelical video: The Light of the World. The 78-minute production consists of 360 oil paintings, most by Fred Carter, with narration written by Chick.

Themes
What a strange, strange world we live in

Where the good are damned and the wicked forgiven Most of his work follows a standard formula generally involving a highly caricatured straw man version of an atheist, Jew, Catholic, homosexual, or some other "sinner". Average Joes/Janes who are completely ignorant of even the basic tenets of Christianity despite living in the western world also frequently show up ("who's this Jesus guy I keep hearing about?"). These ne'er-do-wells then get theologically pwned by either a clean-cut kid who just fell out of a 1950s sitcom or a little old church lady. The sinner then either repents, generally losing whatever worldly position they had as a result, or ignores the proselytizing and ends up in the Lake of Fire, while the Christian kid/little old lady go on to eternal salvation. "Death is probably the most common event seen in Chick tracts, next to falling on the floor and reciting The Sinner's Prayer with a tear drop of sincerity."

Occasionally Chick presents a "historical" tract, but the aforementioned characters are still often used to introduce the story/rant.

Anti-Catholicism
Around 1980, Chick discovered King James Only and anti-Catholicism and published several more Crusader comics blaming the Catholic Church for everything from communism, Satanism, and human sacrifice to the American Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and finally the Holocaust (which was somehow also the fault of the evolutionists). Several of his early titles, including Why No Revival?, The Beast, and The Last Generation, have been extensively revised from their original versions, mostly to incorporate Chick's anti-Catholicism into the later editions.

Chick appears to think that the Roman Catholic Church is part of a Satanist conspiracy to overthrow God's reign on earth. Or… something. His claims about the Jesuits, for instance, include that they were responsible for the creation of the Qur'an, they tutored Karl Marx, started the Soviet Union, and even got the Tsar's gold as a reward. Well, to be more specific, the Catholic Church, according to Chick, gave Lenin $666,000,000 in gold when he was sent to Russia, as part of the plan to destroy the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church used the Tsar's gold to pay them off. This ignores the fact that the Romanov fortune would be inaccessible to them, as it is mostly locked up in Swiss banks for the Romanovs themselves, along with the fact that $666,000,000 in gold would have resulted in the Bolsheviks ending the Russian Civil War in days. Jesuits controlled the Gestapo and were responsible for the Holocaust, the Nazis were created to destroy the Soviet Union as revenge for them betraying the Catholic Church, and somehow this is being deliberately withheld from the American people because of the seemingly infinite influence of the Catholic Church on the media.

But of course, what would any good conspiracy theory be without a mention of the Freemasons? Jack claimed the Roman Catholic Church created the Freemasons, and that they want to unite the world under Baal worship, while their leaders swear oaths on the Qur'an. No, really, you can read this in Mama's Girls, It is perhaps Chick's most conspiracy theory-riddled tract ever.

Most of Jack's sources were from Alberto Rivera, an anti-Catholic activist, admitted con man, and crank, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit. He also repeated, even if they were debunked long ago, claims deriving from  which claimed that the Roman Catholic Church continues a pagan cult founded by the semi-legendary figures Nimrod and Semiramis.

Spiritual warfare
Occasionally, the tracts will feature "spiritual warfare", where angels and demons manipulate real world events to battle over people's souls. In an effort to stay biblically accurate, Chick drew Satan with stereotypical devil horns and a pitchfork. According to Chick, Satan's hobbies include murdering teenagers with chainsaws and watching corny sitcoms and developing rock music. Also, Satan knows very little about Biblical prophecy.

Chick apparently also believed in creepy Haitian voodoo-style magic, since he could use it to bash Catholics.

Several Chick comics dealing with rock music, witchcraft, or Dungeons and Dragons end with a book burning during which the new convert burns their D&D materials, astrology books, ouija boards, rock music, and Satanic books ("including Tolkien and C. S. Lewis").

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


 * "Haw haw — hey guys, this is the dirtiest story I've ever heard!"
 * ''"Adam blew it! Temptation came and we all went down the tubes."
 * ''"The environment will go crazy."
 * "Talk about dumb. That was it!"
 * "Hey friend, remember all those things you told me? You were wrong — you goofed!"
 * "And then it hit the fan."
 * "We're gonna Rock, Rock, Rock, Rock with the ROCK!"
 * Hey! There's an old nut outside — preaching the gospel! Let's go give him the business. Haw! Haw! Haw!

Rewarding bad people, punishing good people
Chick routinely placed 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 convicts are rewarded with entry to Heaven thanks to an eleventh-hour salvation, or are miraculously allowed to live. Chick also seemed to delight greatly in images of naked bodies being thrown into lakes of fire by angels. Often these are the trimmer, better-looking sinners in the tracts, not the fat, ugly, bald stereotyped Jewish ones.

In the same vein as rewarding bad people while punishing good people, Chick had good people go to Hell, where they are gleefully tortured by demons and even the Devil, who seem to derive great joy from torturing people. So, in effect, demons and the devil, who are by definition worse than any human sinner, get the pleasure of torturing those less evil than themselves.

Rape
Chick's sickest tract is arguably Lisa, which has a disgusting enough start then progresses to one of the filthiest endings in history that makes look mild. It is now unavailable in print and isn't on the Chick Publications website either, for some reason. However, the blog Jack Chick's Funnnybook Gospel has it archived with their own commentary, and we have a scanned copy of it for perusal. 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! The tract was also the inspiration for the punk rock narrative "Lisa's Father (Waka Baby)" by the punk band Alice Donut. The narrator of the piece begins by saying he was handed the tract by a door-to-door evangelist.

Trust Me, which still is available on the Chick Publications website, is almost as sick, depicting a brutal rape as lowbrow comedy.

Uninvited deals with AIDS sufferers confronting one of their nurses over her claims they are dying because of demons. Turns out she was raped as a child by two big men… and could have ended up becoming a lesbian, and worse, dying of AIDS, were it not for her accepting Jesus. All the AIDS victims admit to having been molested or raped as children, which apparently results in a demon entering their body and making them homosexual, sending them on a direct course for Hell. Even for Jack Chick, this is fucked up. And unlike Lisa, it is still available from Chick Publications.

Other religions
Chick attacked some religions for supposedly promoting animal sacrifice, apparently blissfully ignorant of the many places in the Bible where God called for animal sacrifices. God even called for the sacrifice of a human being at least once, and Jephtha's daughter actually was sacrificed, with God's approval or at least without rebuke: see Jephthah vs. Ammonites.

Chick also attacked Islam at least once for encouraging parents to use corporal punishment to discipline their children, despite the fact that one of his earlier tracts (Bad Bob) upheld corporal punishment as the right way to raise a Christian child, quoting (loosely rendered as "spare the rod, spoil the child" in modern times).

Chick's seemingly pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist views in Love the Jewish People (first published under the patronizing title Support Your Local Jew) have to be contrasted with Where's Rabbi Waxman?, a tract asserting that Jews will go to Hell if they don't accept Jesus — most Jews would consider this message tantamount to demanding that they fundamentally renounce their Jewishness. Chick's Zionism becomes downright sinister when viewed with his promotion of barely-disguised anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in some of the Crusader comics series (complete with citations to conspiracy theorist and to Alberto Rivera's claims that the Vatican invented Zionism). This could be because the Third Temple must be built to bring about the Apocalypse in Christianity, which will only be possible if the Al-Aqsa Mosque is destroyed and the Temple Mount is taken by Israel, as the site of Solomon's Temple, where it must be built. The mosque is now the third-holiest site in Islam. A sort of symbiotic relationship was spawned between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews because of this.

Finally, Chick linked non-Christianity with violence towards and abuse of children, while not commenting on the fact that God commanded His "chosen people" to go into the land of Canaan and kill every person in it, even unto the children and the babes in arms, and later on to kill every Amalekite also down to the suckling infants.

But even a broken clock is right twice a day
Yes, sometimes Jack actually raised good points. And nowhere is this more obvious than his tract It's Not Your Fault. This being a Chick Tract, it opens with a child suicide at an orphanage known as Happy Halls, which is being investigated by the police. When they question the kids, it is obvious that something has them scared. The police then find out that this is the second child suicide in five years when they look into Happy Halls' history. The orphanage is then closed down and the children are taken away by child services, while the owners threaten the police by saying they will drag Judge Stone into this.

One of the kids ends up at an orphanage run by a woman named Miss Carpenter, and after he has a nightmare, Miss Carpenter sits down to talk with him and ask what it is about. By this point, the police investigation has been called off due to political pressure. As Miss Carpenter talks with the kid who had a nightmare, we find out that Judge Stone molested the kids at Happy Halls, including the one who killed himself, and that the kid in question wants to make him pay. Miss Carpenter reveals that she understands how the kid must feel. It turns out that she and her husband were missionaries in Rwanda, and their congregation was composed of Tutsis. She was the only survivor, but was brutally attacked and raped.

Surprisingly, Jack raises some good points in this tract, such as how a traumatic event can leave deep psychological scars on a person and how badly the UN handled the Rwandan Genocide. The tract proves to actually be a reasonable storyline, until the ending, where Miss Carpenter basically uses fear tactics to make the kid convert to Jesus. It is still pretty crazy and incoherent at times, otherwise this wouldn't be a Chick Tract. Started with a good message, and then it got botched by the ending.

Revisions
In addition to adding anti-Catholic content, Chick had a long history of revising his tracts either to add more recent events or to bowdlerize the more controversial tracts. The offensively titled Support Your Local Jew was reissued as Jeopardy and then as Love the Jewish People. That Crazy Guy, originally about gonorrhea, was changed to make it about herpes, then changed again to AIDS. Escape!, a circa-1970 tract about overpopulation and environmentalism which suggests that the only solution of pollution is… drumroll please… The Rapture; it was later reissued as The Great Escape and updated to include AIDS and the first Gulf War. The Bull, about a convict who finds Christ in prison, originally depicted him using foul language even after he got saved. This has been removed from the current version, but it hasn't been bowdlerized enough to stop him from saying things like "now shut up or I'll break your legs" while preaching. Dark Dungeons had a controversial claim that the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were satanic, which was removed from later editions. Dark Dungeons was also been changed to remove a reference to — Chick apparently finally discovering that the verse is a dog whistle for Jesus-only baptism theology, which is considered heretical by evangelicals. Spellbound? originally had 8-track tapes on the cover, later changed to cassettes, then to compact discs on the current version.

Adapted for Black audiences
Look out, Here come de judge. Here come de judge! Haw Haw! Chick Publications also offers a series of patronizing tracts intended for black audiences, many of which are regular Chick tracts but with new artwork with Black casts (sometimes the faceless God is literally shaded) and different titles/dialogue to reflect a white person's terrible interpretation of African American Vernacular English. Examples: Hi There! became Wassup?, A Love Story became Who Loves You?, Best Friends became Soul Sisters, Charlie's Ants became Kura's Ants, Tiny Shoes became Sneakers, Somebody Goofed became Oops!, Allah Had No Son became Who Is Allah?, Somebody Loves Me became Hard Times, Soul Survivor became Help, Happy Hour became Sunday Special?, and This Was Your Life became It's Your Life! (for men) and Your Big Moment (for women). One exception to this is the 1977 tract Soul Story, which is out of print but available in custom order or for reading on-line. This tract almost comes across as a script for a Christian blaxploitation film, since it is complete with a criminal kingpin named Leroy Brown (presumably the ) who is freed from prison due to a legal technicality and seeks to resume his operations, and characters speaking hopelessly outdated slang ("You stupid jive turkey!"), the story eventually ends with Leroy being led to Jesus as he bleeds to death after an ambush shooting, a deathbed conversion.

Chick had racist attitudes, but it didn't stop him from having an interracial marriage, or working with Fred Carter, an African American. Chick was more just… patronizing in his racism, not KKK racist.

The Last Generation
It is particularly amusing when one of Chick's older tracts is updated as what little coherence and sanity the tract originally had goes right out the window. Nothing illustrates this more than The Last Generation. A copy of the original 1972 tract and an older 1992 version is preserved on the Internet. This tract involves a sort of 1984 meets Soylent Green world with food shortages so bad that people have hunted their pet dogs and cats to extinction, rolling blackouts (that do not affect your "government controlled TV sets"), a world where a glass of reclaimed water cost $5.60, and there are "reports of cannibalism in the major cities, mass starvation, and uncontrolled crime".

The rewrite jettisons huge hunks of Chick's original text, making "The Last Generation" incredibly incoherent while retaining most of the paranoia of the original. The black helicopters and free drugs and torture from the original are retained but the programming of people's minds is replaced with microchips to increase the pain; little Bobby's classmates' calling Bobby "trash" because his parents were the only ones married was changed to calling him "slime" because his parents were still married (and straight); the extinction of dogs and cats is replaced with them being sacrifices for Halloween; Bobby calls his grandfather an "intolerant jerk!" rather than a liar or an "old crud"; and the Healer (still dressed in something that looks like a cross between a wetsuit and a KKK uniform) now becomes a "famous New Age healer". However some of the key parts of the original were totally thrown out: the hint that all of this is about 40 years from the foundation of Israel or 1988; the idea that a college questionnaire would ask about the Second Coming of Jesus and the answer put into a computer; and then there is the ending that has the Arabs along with Russia and Russia's satellite countries all attack Israel… signalling the beginning of WWIII. If that wasn't enough some of the panels are extreme closeups of the original tract, giving the current version an uneven look.

If the original version was just slightly over the top, the current version, even for Chick, is waaaay out there. It is strange that the 1992 rewrite did not include something about WWIII happening, especially as it seemed geared to cash in on the militia movement paranoia.

It seems that if Chick is the one who rewrote this, then even before the 1996 stroke his hold on reality (such as it was) was slipping. Yes, the original was over the top but it was at least somewhat coherent. The 1992 version isn't even that.

Death
Chick died on October 23, 2016, at the age of 92 and is now burning in Hell due to the hateful bile that he preached in the name of God and Jesus. His death was announced on the Chick Publications Twitter account. The coincidence of Chick's death being so close to Hallowe'en is not lost on the reality-based community. In a Facebook posting, David W. Daniels, an author whose work has been printed by Chick Publications, stated, "Our promise to you — Nothing changes: The Method, The Vision, The Purpose". In short, one can expect to see more of the hysteria of Chick's older works in the future. An authorized hagiography, You Don't Know Jack, was published by Chick Publications. The promotional webpage for the book has several photos of the normally camera-shy Chick.

What was probably the last tract that he completed, Sunk!, was published in 2017. In May 2017, the Chick Publications website listed what is apparently the first Chick Publications tract after Chick's death: Adopted. The section of the front cover that normally says "J.T.C." instead says "D.W.D.", the initials of David W. Daniels.

Chick's death inspired a comic about his death and legacy on The Nib, "Jack Chick Goes to Heaven." It's worth a read though Dead To Rights took a look as to Jack's likely fate when he was alive.

Copyright claims
In another example of double-standardism, though not of a religious type, Jack Chick frequently claimed copyright violations for things like reviews and parody both of which in the US are allowed under fair use, which Chick himself used with regard to Dungeons & Dragons, Bewitched, and Family Guy in his very own tracts.

Defamation
In the USA, Chick's tracts are largely legal under the First Amendment of the Constitution, although some tracts may have been cause for defamation suits, such as "Dark Dungeons" which could have led to a lawsuit from Dungeons & Dragons publisher, TSR Inc., for business disparagement. However, in many nations such as Canada, a few Chick tracts are illegal under various hate speech and defamation laws, and they are considered seditious in Singapore.

Factuality
Jack be nimble, Jack T. Chick, Jack be writing a pile of shit; you know what I'm saying?

Questionable source material
Jack Chick was notorious for using questionable and just plain ludicrous "testimonies" as source material. Some (Rivera, Todd, and Brown) were since exposed as frauds, but Chick continued to publish those tracts and comics: • 2

Big Daddy
Many claims that have non-scripture references are questionable at best, misleading, and in some cases flat-out false.

Take Big Daddy? (2002), an atheist professor myth story where Kent Hovind is used for a reference. It is bad enough that Hovind has no degrees from an accredited institution in the relevant fields, that the thesis referred to is of very poor quality, and that his claims are at odds with the published statements of experts in the field, but Chick compounds the insanity by claiming "It has never been against the law to teach the Bible or creation[ism] in public schools." The first part of that statement was false even in 1970 (when the first version of the tract was printed) as 374 U.S. 203 (1963) declared school-sponsored reading of the Bible to be unconstitutional (i.e. against the law). The second part become untrue per Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987)] when the Supreme Court ruled that creationism was specifically intended to advance a particular religion and therefore violated the establishment clause. It has been shown that the 1992 version] did not have this Bible or creation in public schools reference at all and that the footnote for the various stages of man (which did not have Lucy but is otherwise identical to the 2002 version) was "for more details The Collapse of Evolution by Scott Huse available from Chick Publications" rather than the "for more details watch part 2 of the Creation Series video by Kent Hovind" seen in the later version.

In fact, Big Daddy? is presented in the Columbia University Press book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters as a "typical of the genre" example of just how "misleading and dishonest" creationist presentations are. The examples of the "deceptive and misleading" distortions, misrepresentation, and fabrications presented in that work regarding Big Daddy are "Nebraska Man" (the misinterpretation of which was corrected after only a year and whose existence was debated from the beginning ), "New Guinea Man" (which is actually Homo sapiens), and the implication that "Cro-Magnon" was viewed as different from Homo sapiens Many of these points are reiterated in the satire tract of the same name.

Ironically, the Big Daddy tract itself has evolved since it first came out in 1970 with "each leap forward occurring about 5-10 years after real advances in real science turn the older versions into feces."

There Go the Dinosaurs
Sometimes things got worse when Chick didn't use any non-scriptural references. Here, even the most basic knowledge of the subject matter can rip the tract to shreds.

For example, in There Go the Dinosaurs (2007), it is claimed that the flood wiped out most of the plants, reducing the amount of oxygen available to the dinosaurs, making them lethargic resulting in them being killed off (under the name "dragons"). What is particularly bad here is that even the How and Why Wonder book Dinosaurs (1960) acknowledged that not all dinosaurs were big — Archaeopteryx, discovered in 1861, is about the size of a modern chicken, discovered in 1923, is the size of a small dog, and  discovered in 1931, is roughly human-sized. By the logic (and we use the word very loosely) presented one should have Archaeopteryx eggs at the supermarket, be taking our Velociraptors out for walks, and be reading about Deinonychus attacks in Africa. Basic knowledge from a children's book over 50 years old… and Chick doesn't know it.

Still No Revival?
Still No Revival? (2011) continued Chick's commenting on the Inquisition while ignoring the fact that Protestants back then weren’t any better during the English Reformation. Chick seemed to ignore the fact that the King/Queen of England is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which was also responsible for the King James Bible.

It's Coming!
It's Coming! features an atheist whose ideology is entirely reversed by 5 minutes of conversation on a couch in a storm. It contains the creationist arguments the Flood explains seashells on mountains, a vapor canopy existed, the Flood explains geologic columns, and the evolution conspiracy.

Global Warming
Global Warming is not what it sounds like. It is probably the single most confusing tract Jack ever made. Try to make sense of it, and you may find yourself popping a blood vessel. To give the basic gist, Jack first says that global warming is a myth, no wait, the cast of Young Frankenstein is responsible, no, the Catholic church might be the cause, hold on, it's Nostradamus because he may have failed to predict the end of the world, no, that was just a cheap potshot, it's the Muslims, no, no, wait, it's scientists who made predictions that have failed to happen, no, it's the scientists who worship Gaia and the Mayan moon goddess (Ixchel), no, it's JESUS! JESUS IS THE CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING! JESUS WILL END THE WORLD WITH GLOBAL WARMING!

Biblicality
Jack Chick took a perverse delight in pulling the strings of this puppet Christ, having him send dozens of decent people to burn forever in the fires of hell, because he always knew that he would not be one of them.

If that is not bad enough, Chick flubbed researching passages in the KJV of the Bible itself.

Whore of Babylon
In Are Roman Catholics Christians? (1985), Chick claims that the Roman Catholic church is the Whore of Babylon which is awkward when you get to — Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her. If that is not enough,  reiterates — And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

As Catholic Answers correctly points out, the prophets predate Jesus, and the apostles were the 12 original followers of Jesus; therefore the Whore of Babylon is a representation of something that had existed up to the first century CE, i.e. before the Roman Catholic Church formally existed and therefore cannot be the Roman Catholic Church.

Good works
Chick also liked to claim that good works are not the way into Heaven; he failed to explain those passages (like, , -6, , , , , and ) which state that good works are required for salvation. It got really bizarre when Chick points out one part of the Bible and ignores the adjacent passages that totally undermine the very point he raised. For example, in The Chaplain, Chick referred to while ignoring  showing that good works are a requirement. So, he cites the following:

But look at what Chick omits:

This lack of crosschecking research gets really bizarre when one compares tracts. Take Flight 144 (1998) and Somebody Goofed (2002), for example. In Flight 144, Chick has a character state "The Bible says that good works can't save anyone", but in Somebody Goofed Chick has a reference that simply says "**Rev 20:12-15". Well, here is the King James version of that reference, with some boldface added for emphasis:

So Chick provides a reference to a passage that contradicts a claim made by an earlier tract and the really ludicrous part is that both tracts are still in print.

However, if one examines the key message that Chick is saying, that one needs only believe in Jesus to go to Heaven, which is the only way to get there, mind you, and how some characters in the Tracts themselves react to this news, it becomes very clear that this belief can actually encourage hypocrisy. You could go your whole life claiming to be Christian and living a very sinful lifestyle, but declare that you believe in Jesus when you are about to die, and not face any consequences for your actions by going to Heaven. Chick outright has a character in one of his tracts, Happy Halloween, state that the idea of good people going to Heaven and bad people going to Hell is a lie straight from the Devil. The same Tract actually underlines the key problem of Jack Chick's theology.

Dark Dungeons
A film based on the tract Dark Dungeons was released in 2014, following a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $25,000. Despite being created by a group of gamers, the film was deliberately not done as a parody because there was no way they could've made it funnier than the real thing.

Computer animations
Two of Chick's tracts, The Sissy and Little Shoes, were made into rather simplified computer animations by Steve West (with Chick's permission), and were available for viewing on Chick's website, as well as purchase on DVD.

Parodies and satires


The recognizable style of Chick's comics has invited a number of parodies, such as the one pictured at right and a short webcomic by Steve Ellis and Fred van Lente, both involving H.P. Lovecraft's god Cthulhu.

National Lampoon magazine mercilessly parodied Chick tracts in their December 1974 issue, The Judeo-Christian Tradition, or The Joy of Sects.

Some of the best parodies were done by gamers, especially fans of Dungeons & Dragons, in response to his "Dark Dungeons" attack on D&D. In fact, one Open Gaming License fork of D&D is actually named Dark Dungeons; and just in case you thought the name was a coincidence, the example character at the beginning of the rules is Black Leaf, the same thief from the tract.

There are also satires of Chick's comics such as Who's Your Daddy? (satirizing Big Daddy ), and Somebody Loves You? (satirizing Somebody Loves Me ).

Jim Huger of the Jack T. Chick Parody Archive presents satires of Chick tracks that point out errors in the originals. This archive includes The Good, The Bad, and the Fundy (satirizing Gun Slinger), Dead To Rights (satirizing Last Rites), and This Is Your Death (satirizing This Was Your Life).

The 2006 film Hot Chicks spoofs several Chick tracts, by reenacting them verbatim but changing the context to make them hilarious. The rock band in Angels? becomes an angst-ridden 1990s post-grunge act, and the "ex-gay" evangelist in Wounded Children is still so obviously gay that he cannot say "confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus" without being overly erotic when he says the "with your mouth" part.

Comic book fans also get into the act, such as the Marvel comics themed parody Galactus Is Coming! Another person made a DC-themed parody starring Darkseid.

Comedian David Cross released a DVD entitled Let America Laugh in 2003. Each segment of the video shares a title with a Chick tract ("Gomez Is Coming", "Is There Another Christ?", "This Was Your Life", etc.). For the record, Cross is an atheist.

Jello Biafra's lyrics in the Dead Kennedys' song "I Kill Children" quotes the Chick comic Why No Revival ("God told me to skin you alive").

Alice Donut's song "Lisa's Father" skewered the Chick comic Lisa.

Fandom
Some Jack Chick fandom publications exist from people who generally enjoy the art and surreal fantasy of Jack Chick's tracts and comics. An apt comparison may be made to the admirably insane British artist of the late 18th/early 19th century whose views on religion eventually bloomed into his own highly surreal illustrated poems. Kurt Kuersteiner has published a book on Chick and produced a movie ("God's Cartoonist"). Chick tracts and comics are also sold and distributed by comic fans for enjoyment, as well as by the fundamentalists who distribute the tracts for evangelism. Kristi Harrison of Cracked.com, who was raised in a born-again household, is one such fan, comparing Chick's mindset to that of "a crazy 8-year-old cherry-picking the parts of late-night HBO movies that he caught glimpses of when his babysitter thought he wasn't looking", and mourns the thought of them going away and depriving people of that entertainment value.

There was even a "Chick Tract Club" devoted to collectors of the tracts (who refefred to themselves as "Chicklets").

Most popular


The all time best seller of these is This Was Your Life!, in which a pipe-smoking, up-scale 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 Judgement Day. Adultery! Fornication! Foul language! Drinking! Disbelief in Jesus! God then casts this sinner into the Lake of Fire. (Oh, and since Chick Tracts are translated into 100+ languages, Americans shouldn't be surprised if they see ¡Esta Fue Tu Vida! available at many of the finer coin laundries and public restroom stalls in their area, or आपका जीवन ऎसा था!, 你的一生! and 이것이 당신의 삶이었습니다! sitting just inside the doors of Asian grocery marts, complete with racial equivalent protagonists (also note the narrowing of the eyes between the two Far East Asian versions). Even Esperantists shouldn't be surprised if they find a copy of Jen Via Tuta Vivo! among the brochures at their next convention.) As with many Chick tracts, the same story is available in patronizing female and ethnic variants: It's Your Life, You Have a Date, Your Big Moment, and so on. In 2014, Chick released yet another version of the tract, Your Best Life, aimed directly at Muslims.

Other tracts
1960s: (paranoid right-wing view of the 1960s counterculture) 1970s: 1980s: 2000s:
 * Bewitched?: A hippie girl into LSD, Ouija boards, astrology, and all the other usual bad hippie occult stuff being won to Christ just in time as she is dying in a hospital from an LSD flashback.
 * The Poor Revolutionist: New Left revolutionaries overthrow the government, only to find that the new Marxist regime they helped bring to power has them early on the list for mass executions.
 * Creator or Liar?: An oversimplified presentation of the gospel.
 * The Sissy?: Two truck drivers who think Jesus was a sissy because he turned the other cheek being scared straight by a giant Christian truck driver at a truck stop diner.
 * A Demon's Nightmare: Spiritual warfare in the life of a new convert.
 * The Mad Machine: One of the few Chick tracts that is supposed to be humorous that actually is (stopped clock in effect here — the tract is an attack on 1970s psychotherapy fads).
 * The Death Cookie is an attack on the Roman Catholic Mass. The cookie refers to the communion wafer, which is, according to the tract, a trick devised by the Devil to get people to worship a cookie as God. Each communion wafer is depicted as having a "demon" behind it because it is an idol.
 * Angels: Anti-Christian rock and depicts a Christian rock band finding that in order to be commercially successful, they have to sign their souls over to their manager, Lew Siffer. They give up their Christian idealism for fame, fortune, and writing hit songs like "Embrace Me, Love Of Death". Under Siffer's management, their concerts have actual demon]s coming out of their loudspeakers, and the members of the band soon find themselves with AIDS or dabbling in vampirism, until one of them reads a Chick tract found in his pocket, realizes he has been duped, and repents of involvement in rock music.
 * Dark Dungeons: is anti-Dungeons and Dragons and depicts a high school girl being led into Wicca by her group's dungeon master, who felt she was ready to cast real spells due to "the intense occult training" D&D provided. She casts spells on her father to make him buy her more D&D materials, but becomes alarmed and wants out after one of her friends commits suicide. She visits an evangelist's revival meeting, where she is encouraged to turn her life over to Jesus and to bring her Dungeons and Dragons books that evening for a book burning.
 * Wounded Children: So bad that Chick himself recalled it! This disaster promotes the ex-gay movement; among other ridiculous things, it has a young man becoming homosexual after finding his father's heterosexual pornography collection, which causes him to fall under the influence of demons who lead him into "masturbation and sexual fantasy" and convince him he is a girl in a boy's body. (Yes, Chick confuses homosexuals with transgender people, but that is among the least of the problems with his writing.) He grows up and heads for the gay neighborhood of the city, which is depicted as a sleazy ghetto of bars, gay baths, and back-alley porno shops. Becoming disillusioned with the "gay lifestyle", he is approached by an "ex-gay" evangelist in a gay bar who leads him to Jesus. The incredibly homophobic (and slightly homo-erotic) tract is out of print, and not even available on Chick.com, and the pages from it are available, with commentary, on the blog "Enter the Jabberwock". Apparently, Wounded Children was quite controversial. Fred Carter outdid himself with pure homo-erotica in the artwork — even the demons look like the epitome of homomasculinity — and Chick has gone back to publishing more conventional anti-gay attacks like Doom Town and The Gay Blade.
 * That's Baphomet? (originally The Curse of Baphomet) has a boy attempting suicide. Instead of maybe, you know, getting some counseling for the poor kid, a Christian friend convinces his parents that their being Masons and Shriners has brought "witchcraft" into their home and caused their son's condition. They burn all their lodge-related paraphernalia and the son miraculously recovers.

Prime targets
• 2

Lesser targets

 * Buddhists
 * Cat haters
 * C.S. Lewis

Conspicuously missing from that list

 * Eastern Orthodox Church — Although Russians and Greeks are mentioned now and then, their denomination is never brought into consideration, although many of their customs and traditions are very similar to those of the "pagan" Catholic Church: gradual salvation, rituals, priests, monks, mass, sacraments, "idolatry" icons, "worship" of Mary and saints, Inspired Holy Church fathers etc. One would think that Orthodoxy belongs to the Roman Catholic system (no mention of the Great Schism is ever made), but on the other hand, they are also an enemy of the Catholic Church, so maybe it was better to leave them out. Although it's more likely that Chick's worldview was so narrow that he didn't even notice the difference.
 * Japanese animation and manga — Considering his contempt for non-western cultures, one would think that Chick would have written a comic decrying the dangers of Japanese animation, or at the least taken a potshot at perennial favorite target Pokémon.
 * Lighthouses — Just as phallic as obelisks. Where was Chick on the phallic lighthouse menace?
 * Nazis — Not entirely true, he had a lot of material seemingly anti-Nazi, but he always blamed the Vatican for them. Sort of made worse in that one of his tracts that "uncovers" a Vatican conspiracy that blames Catholics for the Holocaust, he used the enormously bad phrase "those poor Nazis", when talking about how the Vatican left them holding the bag on that one. His book Smokescreens has a chapter on Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco as the Vatican's trinity of dictators with Father Coughlin the Vatican's pro-fascist voice in the U.S. He never published anything critical of Nazism in its own right without using it as a cover for his anti-Catholicism. It should go with mention that even here, Chick was at least less wrong than Pope Benedict XVI was in blaming Nazism on atheists.
 * — Did Chick even know the difference between that and the Eastern Orthodox Church? In his defense, many if not most Americans don't. He erroneously described Ethiopia, a plurality Oriental Orthodox nation, as a Muslim country, though. He also blamed the "Alexandrian Cult" (the predecessor of today's Coptic Church) for corrupting the Bible during the first few centuries.
 * Scientology — One would think he would have done an anti-Scientology tract, but surprise!, he didn't. Of course, this is probably a good thing, since he would most likely have claimed Scientology like everything else is an invention of the Roman Catholic Church. Still, it's quite odd he didn't touch that subject at all. Maybe he feared a lawsuit from the CO$… that they could win.
 * Seventh-Day Adventist Church — You would think a religious movement having a prophet whose "visions" are treated as coming from God and which have influenced the theology would be viewed as suspicious and even heretical… maybe excepted if the anti-Catholic sector of this religion is also buying tracts.
 * Shrimp — Surely Chick could have found the time to alert the world to the fact that God hates shrimp.
 * Star Trek — A series that has a guy with pointed ears and arched eyebrows being portrayed as a good person just has to be the work of Satan! Also the show encourages respecting the beliefs of other cultures and even endorses a policy forbidding pushing the Christian religion onto non-Christian cultures. And the show has made some comments critical of religion ("We all create God in our own image" in Star Trek I, for instance). Why was there no hate for this?
 * Star Wars — Oh, come on! The Force has to be satanic as it's about people having a supernatural power on their own that does not come from God. Plus those lightsabers are awfully phallic…
 * Steampunk — The awfully Chick-esque Disciples of the New Dawn did attack steampunk-ers, though. However, it's possible the Disciples of the New Dawn are actually a parody of Chick-style fundamentalism rather than a serious organization.
 * Video games — Despite the use of computers, Chick never created a tract attacking video games, particularly the ones similar to the Dungeons & Dragons' genre such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars (that's probably a good thing as well, since he would have done some sort of Satanic conspiracy theory on video games).

Pro

 * His website.
 * Biography at Christian Comics International

Neutral

 * ''The Imp? #2: Holy Book of Jack Chick with Apocrypha and Dictionary-Concordance. King Imp Edition, edited by Daniel K. Raeburn, 1998. An analysis of Chick comics.
 * Jack T. Chick Museum of Fine Art. A bit snarky, seems to sympathize with Chick or is that just part of the snark? You decide.
 * Dark Dungeons - JonTron. JonTron reviews the kickstarted film adaptation of "Dark Dungeons." While subjecting it to his usual grandiose and obtuse reviewing style, as well as questioning the film's acting, casting, and premise, he doesn't go after Christianity itself. In fact, he actually praises the scene where Debbie finds Marcie's suicide note as how to do an actual, true-to-the-source-material adaptation.
 * Chick Tracts at TVTropes. TVTropes analyzes the tropes present in the tracts as well as its many research errors and issues. While mostly neutral, there's a Drinking Game (say goodbye to your liver) and the "YMMV" and especially the "Narm" subpages have space for snark.

Anti

 * Enter the Jabberwock. (Internet Archive) Great and funny dissections of Chick tracts from a agnostic/atheist view.
 * Boolean Union Tract Dissections. Dissections of Chick tracts similar to Jabberwock.
 * Jack Chick's Funnybook Gospel. Reviews of Chick tracts and general discussion of Chick's favorite hobbyhorse issues.
 * Mystery Science Theater 3000 dissects a Jack Chick tract. Contains awesome mockery of Chick (il)logic.
 * Who's your Daddy. (Internet Archive) Realistic parody of Jack Chick's "Big Daddy".
 * The Nightmare World of Jack T. Chick. (Internet Archive) Catholic website telling what's wrong with the tracts (archived version)
 * The Jack T. Chick Parody Archive contains satire tracts such as:
 * Dead to Rites (Satire of "Last Rights" with Jack Chick himself in the primary role.)
 * Somebody Loves You?
 * The Good, The Bad, and the Fundy (Satire of "Gun Slinger" with some ideas from other tracts (such as "Poor Pope?") thrown in)


 * From Slate.com during the week following his death:
 * In the Whore’s Clutches: How anti-Catholic cartoonist Jack Chick became a figure of camp fascination.  Columnist Ruth Graham comments on Chick's unique take on Christianity two days after his death.  (The "whore" in the title refers to Chick calling the Catholic Church "the great whore" in the tract "Man in Black".)
 * Evangelical Cartoonist Jack Chick Was The Dr. Seuss of ‘Hate Lit’. A more in-depth discussion of Chick's legacy, aimed at readers who have never heard of him; with synopses of several of his tracts, including the infamous Lisa.


 * Framing Catholicism: Jack Chick's Anti-Catholic Cartoons and the Flexible Boundaries of the Culture Wars by Michael Ian Borer & Adam Murphree (2008) Religion and American Culture 18(1):95–112. doi:10.1525/rac.2008.18.1.95.
 * The Bad Webomics Wiki article. Or: Why a moderate Christian would think that this is offensive.
 * Spacebattles forum dissection thread, a nerdy but intelligent point of view. Also, the person doing the let's read - who has contributed to this article - is a Catholic.

Parody

 * Saturnalia. (Internet Archive) Web-based parody by Patrick Sean Farley. For mature readers. (Archived at the Internet Archive)
 * Why We're Here. Parody tract by Steve Ellis and Fred Van Lente, based on the Cthulhu mythos.
 * Chick Tract Satire. (Internet Archive) A collection of parodies.