Jack T. Chick’s cartoon gospel tracts offer some of the most interesting reading you’re likely to have thrown through the open window of your parked car. The tracts aren’t generally sold in stores; they’re distributed by an all-volunteer army of born-again Christians, and throwing them through car windows is one of the recommended means of distribution. Though Jack T. Chick prefers that his followers give the tracts out by hand, he has a multitude of suggestions for those who are too shy to “witness” in person: leave tracts “in empty coat pockets at clothing stores,” “between cans on grocery shelves,” hidden in phone booths and library books, in laundromats and restrooms. I’ve generally found them lying on the ground, scuffed and trampled, presumably thrown there by someone less than thrilled to find a tract hidden away in a strange place, waiting for them and their sins like some kind of unexploded gospel bomb.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The tracts are based on a simple principle: bait and switch. They’re designed to lure their readers with deceptive titles and innocent looking drawings, before unleashing their “hardhitting” gospel messages. J.T.C.–as Chick calls himself–is not ashamed to mislead his readers as long as it gets them hooked; he’ll try anything to ensure that, as the slogan goes, “Chick Tracts Get Read!” The tracts are so strident, and so outlandish, that it’s not easy for an unbeliever like myself to get through many of them without giggling. J.T.C., though, is deadly serious, and barely aware of his own hysterical absurdity. At the end of one particularly loopy advertisement for Christ, J.T.C. pulls out his trump card: “If you find yourself laughing at this story, think about this: where will you spend eternity? In heaven? Or in the lake of fire?” (The lake of fire shuts up the critics every time.)
Part of the charm (at least for us unbelievers) comes from Chick’s simple ineptitude. Though he’s been producing tracts for decades he remains a true naif. His language is as awkward as his art, and the logic of his arguments are as twisted as his contorted plots. Most endearingly, the tracts are rife with bizarre anachronisms–much of the stock is left over from Chick’s early years, and these early tracts feature long-haired, bell-bottomed youths railing against the “establishment.” But even the newer tracts seem caught in a kind of time warp. A 1992 tract warning against the Satanist conspiracy of safe-sex is illustrated by a 1970’s-era Steve Martin wannabe on the cover, with an arrow through his head (the tract is called, appropriately enough, “That Crazy Guy”); when the main character, an innocent young girl led off the straight and narrow path by a handsome stranger, finds out that she has AIDS, all she can say is: “Wow! That’s heavy!”
Chick takes a special pride in being able to reach the most hardened, testosterone-loaded transgressors out there in the wicked world, to go mano a mano with the roughest sinners. The tract “The Sissy?” (“Great for truck drivers and bikers”) attempts to prove that Jesus Christ was the original macho man. Duke, an unkempt, ungainly trucker, with hair sprouting from every exposed patch of his flabby flesh, is convinced that Jesus was a sissy. He’s taken to task by a smooth-talking Christian trucker (whose stong-but-sensitive features contain equal parts Clint Eastwood and Elvis), who assures him that Jesus suffered like a he-man to atone for all our sins: “You see, Duke, He was beaten to a pulp for you! That’s how much he loved you!” Duke is convinced; driving off the next day with his little buddy Billy Joe, he bursts out, in a kind of manly awe, “Jesus had more guts than any man that ever lived…and I love him for that.” (J.T.C. is as impressed as Duke with Jesus’ stolid suffering, offering in one full-length comic book a “medical view of the crucifixion” emphasizing the blood and gore of the lamb.) In another highly virile tract, “The Bull,” an ugly, ultra-macho convict (so feared by guards and the other prisoners that he virtually runs the high-security prison in which he’s incarcerated) is won over to Jesus by a Chick tract left in his cell. (“Somebody bring me a Bible and that #$%! chaplain!” he bellows through the bars.) Soon the once-terrifying Bull is winning souls for Christ; calling the prisoners together for a mass meeting he announces his conversion: “I’m madder than I’ve ever been in my life!” he shouts. “I hate sin and I won’t put up with it any more! As of right now, the killing stops! There will be no more raping, because I just found out that God hates sodomy!”
Chick has a thing about the Druids. Several tracts warn against the dangers of Halloween; the apparently innocent custom of “trick or treat” is itself a sinister relic of Druidic ceremonies, and even today Satanist conspiracies use the holiday as an excuse for HUMAN SACRIFICE! (Wow! That’s heavy!) In “Boo,” a group of suburban Satanists load their trick or treat candies with drugs and razorblades. Eight-year old Johnny Dexter dies of a drug overdose; his last word, appropriately enough, is “YAAAAAAHHH!” Months later, the neighbors learn the dark truth behind little Johnny’s death. “The children who are mutilated and murdered every Halloween are no accident,” born-again Becky tells them solemnly. “They are carefully planned sacrifices to Satan, carried out by those who serve and worship him.” Her audience reels in horror: “Are you saying little Susie and Jerry are under Satan’s influence?” The answer, of course, is yes–J.T.C. can be pretty predictable–but the story has a happy ending: Becky leads the children to Christ before they are swallowed up by juvenile delinquency and the forces of Evil. (Now that’s a real treat!)
