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Jack Chick, His Xtian Comics & Extreme Religious Pulp Propaganda

They don't make it easy to actually find the price of any of these comics though! ventually found they're about $2.25 each and also there is a shop which sells them here in Edinburgh!

Gordon
 
As for Allah had no son, which contains the.. erm.... interesting view that Islam has brought England to it's knees, and Allah isn't God at all, but a Pagan deity, well, there's another version, especially for black readers.

Nice to see he's supports equal opportunities in his offensive bollocks-spreading.
 
Actually, you can get Jack Chick comics for free - there's this Christian stall that sometimes comes out at my local market, and if you go up to the guy there and ask for some, he'll give them to you.

There's no need for deception, either: I assured the fellow that I was unlikely to be swayed by the material, but it made no odds to him.

Jack Chick comics are extremely funny, I think. "Thank you for showing me the way. I'll never be a homosexual again." :lol: "Islam is just one big Catholic plot that went wrong." :laughing: "It's because you're a freemason that your child is dying!" :rofl: "Recommended reading for children and young people." :wince:

Right-wing Xtian paranoia at its finest!
 
Religious cack is produced in bulk and seems to have no relation to ordinary laws of supply and demand. I suspect its natural trajectory is from drawing-board to bin, annoying as many people as possible on its way.

I worked briefly in a small silk-screen printing-works in the days before computers were used. Priority was given to profitable lines such as football favours, scarves and car-stickers but when those jobs were cleared, the company turned out religious cartoons. They were inoffensive versions of Bible stories, destined for African missions. Because the owners were mad Christians, they did the work more or less at cost-price for a Trust.

The company employed a highly-emotional graphic artist who usually managed half a day at his desk before throwing down his brushes and rushing home in a flood of tears. His designs, which I now wish I'd kept, seemed to reflect his own psycho-drama. I well recall Mrs. Boss instructing us to scrap a whole rackfull of this bloke's interpretation of The Flood, because she thought it would scare the children who saw it. He had depicted the main events of the story on the first page, which left the whole of the facing page free for a ghastly fantasy of the scene after the waters had receded. Skeletons everywhere! There was also the face of Noah, looking like something out of Munch. :eek:
 
There is a currenjt series from Vertigo/DC called Testament, which is both Biblical and weird fantasy/sci fi:

http://www.dccomics.com/comics/?cm=5387
Written by Douglas Rushkoff; Art and cover by Liam Sharp

From the imagination of best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff, one of the most iconoclastic and acclaimed minds of our era, comes a graphic novel series that exposes the "real" Bible as it was actually written, and reveals how its mythic tales are repeated today.

Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades that uses any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking and mysticism to fight a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age.
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Simon Bisley is also in on the act:

Simon Bisley Illustration From The Bible HC
A Work in Progress. Who would have thought it? Amazing images of epics, death and destruction from the premiere fantasy illustrator. A much-anticipated collection of 120 sketches, toned pencils, and full-color paintings, most full-page, plus a two-page color panel that folds out.
Bisley's inspired, powerful interpretations of scenes from the Old and New Testament include the fall of Lucifer, the flood, the life of Christ, and saints and warriors. Bible quotes accompany each piece. Magnificent, dynamic work, handsomely bound in hardcover. Heavy Metal.
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Other interesting sites:

http://www.staircasestudio.com/comics/index.html

http://www.geocities.com/richleebruce/bible-comics.html
 
I've been a follower of Jack Chick for some years. Note that he looks just like Ned Flanders - I wonder if the character was vaguely based on him?
 
I wonder! I've never seen a picture of Chick but in my mind he is now yellow-skinned, mustachioed and bespectacled. :lol:
 
ah, perhaps I'm getting confused. I could have been sure he looked like Ned Flanders, but apparently not :?
 
He looks kind of Satanic to me.
 
I think the picture is of somebody who worked on that Jack Chick article. According to a long magazine article on Chick in the IMP, no known photographs exist of him as he's very paranoid, but they had a sketch of him that showed him to be a slight little pudgy guy with a comeover.

Here is a review of the Imp issue:
Unearthing famed Christian artist Jack T. Chick

By Richard von Busack

A POODLE PETTER, "a dead ringer for Slim Pickens," a member of the military-industrial complex--he's all of these things and much, much more. The mysterious Jack T. Chick of Chino, Calif., is finally unearthed in The Imp, #2, a pocket-sized zine published by Daniel Raeburn of Chicago. At long last, Raeburn exposes the legendary recluse who has sent out into the world some 400 million books in 70 languages.

Everyone has seen Chick's comics, those grisly little rectangles of pulp epitomizing the violently paranoid, apocalyptic side of fundamentalist Christianity. Chick has carpeted the globe with his tiny comic-book pamphlets, each about the size of a dollar bill. Behind this empire of Christian comics is a man of J.D. Salinger-caliber anonymity.

According to Raeburn's correspondent, Dwayne Walker, the noted cartoonist/evangelist is a little bald man who looks exactly like Slim Pickens' character in Dr. Strangelove. Now that he is a full-time publisher, Chick lives in Riverside County with his silver poodle. Despite the aftereffects of a stroke, he still turns out dozens of his bloodthirsty Christian comics and books.

In his youth, Chick was one of the few Marines to survive Okinawa. Raeburn supposes that the horrors Chick saw there have colored his vision of the world. Chick got his start in the aerospace industry as a technical illustrator for AstroScience Inc., a defense contractor in L.A. Thus, in Chick, the Cold War fantasy of imminent Soviet invasion is linked to the Fundamentalist fantasy of imminent Satanic invasion.

Chick's fire-and-brimstone brand of religion dates to the Puritans, but he's also plainly influenced by grisly E.C. horror comics. Chick favors the shock punch line, in which Satan takes the place of the crypt keeper. The devil guffaws ("Haw haw haw!" is the Chick signature laugh) as yet another deluded sinner meets a 1,000,000-Fahrenheit fate in Hell.

Chick's sizable body of work includes some exceptional moments. In Somebody Loves Me, a Keane-eyed kid is clubbed to death and goes to Heaven. This Was Your Life is even more striking in the kind of cinema it proposes. This small comic claims that our deeds are recorded by angels with cameras; after we die, the 75-year-long epic is projected on a cloud-borne drive-in screen. God, the ultimate critic, gives the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to decide whether we'll spend eternity boasting or roasting.

Big Daddy, another lulu, depicts a stereotypically Jewish professor trying unsuccessfully to indoctrinate a good blond Aryan kid with the lie that granddad was a gorilla. Actually, Chick likes Jews, knowing that their eventual conversion to Christianity will herald the Apocalypse. But Chick loathes the Catholic church ("I call her 'The Whore of Revelations,' " Chick told The Imp's Walker). In the mythology that Chick has constructed, the Catholics control everything: the U.N., the worldwide Communist Party, New Age cults, the Council on Foreign Relations.

In Chick's scheme, the Catholics are currently busy creating the One World Government. This reign of terror will bring with it disease, decadence, famine and $5 glasses of water--a horror seen only in some supper clubs, at present. Soon after will come guillotines--mounted on parking-police three-wheelers--to trim the necks of those without the Mark of the Beast. ("Serves him right," smiles a middle-aged suburban duffer in The Beast, as an onlooker gloats, "Kill him! Haw haw haw!")

Perhaps Chick picked up the idea of guillotines for those unnumbered by the Beast from Salem Kirban's bestselling Christian novel 666 (Tyndale House, 1970). Funny, Chick is a real Pope-hater, yet he borrows the old church tradition of using ghastly horror stories to save souls, reveling in the lives and ordeals of martyrs, making their torture more hideous in each new version.

CHICK'S COMICS are so fascinating because they contain such maniacal passion and rage in their apocalyptic images. The man is a great folk artist; his visions of war in the Invisible World are the newest versions of a style of imagery that has influenced American populist thinking for centuries.

Comics reduce the human condition to its purest form. To see Chick's worst-case-scenario Christianity illustrated as a comic pamphlet is like seeing a reduction of a reduction. Chick confirms our worst fears of ignornance and prejudice. To read Chick is to have the thrill of horror comics restored for the first time since childhood.

You can be absolutely revolted by the pin-headed Christianity espoused in these booklets, you can guffaw at the kind of terrorized faith that finds Satanism in the TV show Bewitched--still, it's hard to distance yourself from the rawness of Chick's sick images, each one jolting with klaxonlike blasts of shock, each as powerful as the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist.

Raeburn not only managed to get a profile of Chick but has also written an incisive analysis of the worship of power in Chick comics, especially as seen in the recurrent theme of Jesus as the king ass-kicker in the universe. A favorite plot of Chick's is to have tough guys convert when they learn that Jesus wasn't just a long-haired sissy.

The Imp, which costs $5, can be ordered by writing to 1454 W. Summerdale 2C, Chicago, IL 60640). Chick's unending oeuvre can be found at laundromats near you, but check also Libreria Cristiana, 3126 16th St., San Francisco. Hide your Satanist paraphernalia when shopping there.
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MrRING said:
that showed him to be a slight little pudgy guy with a comeover.
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Do you mean 'comb over' and was that a freudian slip? :twisted:
 
He was the inspiration for There's Something About Mary.
 
MrRING said:
I think the picture is of somebody who worked on that Jack Chick article. According to a long magazine article on Chick in the IMP, no known photographs exist of him as he's very paranoid, but they had a sketch of him that showed him to be a slight little pudgy guy with a comeover.
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My apologies that is indeed a picture of the journalist.

Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Chick is a drawing of Chick

Gordon
 
Whoever drew the pictures is a wasted talent. I mean, the drawings are actually not bad.
It's just such a shame that they're so misguided... :(

I wonder how many Muslims have seen that 'Allah had no son' tract - the ructions over that would probably be on the scale of the Danish cartoons controversy. No wonder the entire Islamic world seems to hate America.
Perhaps if we handed Jack Chick over to Al Qaeda, peace would break out all over the world.
 
Jack Chick productions is actually two artists...Jack Chick has the more cartoony style of the famous "This Was Your Life" track. There is one other artist in his stable, an African American artist no less, who worked on the "Crusaders" comic books and single-handedly animated their feature film. He's phenomenal.
 
He's not that good!

The thing about Jack Chick's work is that it's the extreme end of the scale, and so more moderate Christians deplore it. Yet still, whenever someone tries to convert me to Christianity, they're using exactly the same basic threat - that without accepting Jesus, I will go to hell - just without the comic trappings of Chick. I always find that a very nasty threat indeed.
 
H_James: "I will go to hell . . . I always find that a very nasty threat indeed."

Yes, but when I was a student, the more immediate threat was that my clappy neighbour would try and Kum-Ba-Yah me a second time.

A foretaste of Eternity for a free coffee! :err:
 
I love this crap for the same reason I used to read the Watchtower when the nuts came round. It's just so damn funny that people actually believe in this tat and think others will be swayed by its er, persuasive arguments. Where exactly are the dinosaurs in the Bibble again?!

And it's nice to see that the artist drew the man who wants to 'help homosexuals' as Jeffrey Dahmer!
 
Mythopoeika said:
I wonder how many Muslims have seen that 'Allah had no son' tract - the ructions over that would probably be on the scale of the Danish cartoons controversy.
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Better hope they don't read Dante's Inferno either :)
 
I've followed Chick's work for many years -- or rather, it follows me. Bible bookstores in the states have whole racks of the stuff, by title, and they're available cheap in volume. Churches of a particular type buy the stuff and pass it out in their various crusades.

A couple of years ago I worked as a teacher's aide in a predominately Latino elementary school in California. Many schools in the states have Halloween parades; the kids wear their costumes to school, and they parade around campus or the nearby streets while parents look on. Anyway, after the parade was over and we went back to class, I noticed that every kid in the classroom (second grade) had a Jack Chick comic in their little hands -- the one about Halloween being Satanic. In Spanish. Somebody stood next to parade route with a stack of these, apparently, and handed them out to every child who passed. The back was stamped with the name of a revival church a couple of blocks away.

I collected the comic books from the kids, explaining that they were passed out by people who thought that Halloween was bad and wanted to say bad things about it. Kids, do you think Halloween is BAD? "NOOOOO..." and they had their party and that was the end of it.

Chick may have a ministry, but he's basically a supplier to others. He makes bullets of weirdness and sells them to like-minded religionists to fire.
 
min_bannister said:
Somebody already pointed that out above. :)
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Thank you. You have to understand that I have severe vision problems and sometimes this list is quite a blur to me, even at 150 % magnification.
 
Hey OTR, do you have a scroll mouse? If so, you can use it to make the text on many web pages bigger. :D

You hold 'ctrl' and roll the scroll wheel without moving the mouse and the text grows and shrinks before your eyes. 8)
 
Well i grew up in a very fundamentalist church. So fundamentalist that they considered the "southern baptists" to liberal and would all burn in hell because they allowed divorce. Oh and they gave us kiddies all these jack chick comics, i still have the full color ones. Horrid stuff. But even I was forced to watch worse was when i was about 6 or 7 i was forced to watch this "rapture" movie. It was horrible and frightening especially when you are a small child and told this could happen anyday. The people in it are left behind in the rapture and are being beheaded if they don't take the "mark of the beast". After seeing this for months anytime i couldn't find my mother i would panic and cry thinking i had been left behind and i was going to have me head chopped off. So as you can imagine I am not much for church or any trappings of these religious types. How my sister and myself came through what refer now to as "the cult" with even a small amount of sanity is beyond me.
 
Well done for getting through that. It clearly means you, and your sister, are survivors. It's hearing stories like yours that really makes my blood boil.

My grandmother told me that when her elder sister died (circa: 1918) the vicar told her that her dead sister's spirit lived among the rafters and was watching her etc etc. Bastards.
 
gl5211 said:
But even I was forced to watch worse was when i was about 6 or 7 i was forced to watch this "rapture" movie. It was horrible and frightening especially when you are a small child and told this could happen anyday. The people in it are left behind in the rapture and are being beheaded if they don't take the "mark of the beast". .
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Aha the rapture series of films, based on the Left Behind books:

A Thief in the Night
A Distant Thunder
Image of The Beast
The Prodigal Planet

The apocalypse on a tiny budget and with bellbottoms!

Also remade recently I notice in 2000(haven't seen these ones).
 
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