Jack T. Chick Obituary

B. 1924
JACK T. CHICK
The fundamentalist zealot whose cartoons also inspired underground comics.

New York times

BY DAN BARRY 

December 21, 2016

He drew inspiration from a painting he kept on display in his studio, a depiction of souls plummeting into hell — a constant reminder of the multitudes that even his pen, wielded by a cartoonist for Christ, could not save from eternal fire. Still, Jack T. Chick did what he could, illustrating and mass-marketing his palm-size booklets that told different stories with the same message: If you do not accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you are hellbound.

And in scattering some 900 million so-called Chick tracts all over the world — his faithful readers were advised to tuck them under windshield wipers, into clothes pockets at department stores, even into the rental shoes at bowling alleys — Chick built a multimillion-dollar publishing empire on works that sold for less than 20 cents apiece.

Chick knew the precise moment when he made the transition from foulmouthed World War II veteran, a would-be actor who doodled on the side, to true believer. It was a Sunday in 1948, and his new in-laws insisted that he listen to “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour” on the radio. The host quoted a line from the Book of Isaiah — “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” — and Chick fell to his knees.

After a decade of struggling to combine his artistic talent with his burning faith, Chick struck upon an idea while giving a Gospel lesson to a group of inmates that incorporated a flip chart with his own illustrations. Eventually that same artwork became his most famous tract, published in 1964: “This Was Your Life!” In it, a man holding a drink drops dead, and an angel whisks him to a celestial drive-in theater, where scenes from his past play before him: that time he told a dirty story, ogled a young woman (“ummm NICE!”), wondered about the score of a ballgame while in church. His sins are tallied, and his name is not found in the Book of Life; he is damned. But an alternate ending is on offer: Embrace Jesus and be rewarded with joyous eternity. “This Was Your Life!” is said to have been published more than 50 million times, in Zulu, Tagalog and more than a hundred other languages.

‘I routinely ask my secretary if we are getting any hate mail. If she says no, I get upset because I think I’m doing something wrong.’

By the 1980s, new works by Chick were appearing every couple of months. They are classic forms of effective, quick-strike storytelling, every illustrated panel propelling the reader to the next, as dramatic tension builds: Just how far will the author go in rendering the wrath and mercy of God? In “Gun Slinger,” an Old West killer for hire goes to heaven after turning to Christ just before he’s hanged, while the marshal who captured him goes to hell for never having done the same. In “Lisa,” a man who has been molesting his young daughter is confronted by the family physician, who — rather than call the police — invites the predator to pray for repentance. All is forgiven!

Chick’s widely parodied works were intolerant, paranoid, Satan-obsessed. “Angels?” includes a musical agent named Lew Siffer who says he controls billions of souls through rock ’n’ roll: “In the ’50s and ’60s I started gradually, introducing my new beat into some of the crooners . . . at first it was nice and soft. Then I gave them Elvis and the Beatles, etc.” Dan Raeburn, who published a zine, The Imp, about underground comics, characterizes Chick’s work as “the dark heart of American fundamentalism.”

But Chick’s “soul-winning tracts,” as they were called, also earned him recognition as a kind of underground-comics patriarch. Raeburn once devoted an entire issue of The Imp to Chick. Kurt Kuersteiner, author of “The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick,” describes his cartoons as “an inspiration to countless artists who otherwise condemned his religious and conservative views.”

Yet those views appalled some religious bodies, like the Christian Booksellers Association and the Catholic Church, which took issue with Chick’s frequent anti-Catholic depictions, including the claim, laid out in “The Awful Truth,” that the Jesuits were behind the assassination of Lincoln. That conviction may underpin why, in late middle age, he came to suspect that his own life might be in danger. In the end, the creator behind religious tracts that were ubiquitous removed himself from public view so effectively that for decades only those closest to him even knew what he looked like.

Dan Barry is a national columnist for The New York Times and the author, most recently, of “The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland.”

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/21/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-jack-chick.html?_r=0

In the Whore's Clutches

How anti-Catholic cartoonist Jack Chick became a figure of camp fascination.

Slate
Ruth Graham
OCT. 25 2016

Jack Chick—fundamentalist cartoonist, outsider artist, and purveyor of evangelist tracts—died Sunday at 92. The grand theme of Chick’s lurid cartoon pamphlets was that anyone who rejected his particular strain of Christianity would suffer forever in hell. His publications railed against Masonry (“Satan is the true force behind Masonry”) and Halloween (“Satan loves Halloween”). Evolution, communism, Harry Potter, Family Guy, The Walking Dead, and Christian rock music were of the devil, too. His work smeared faiths including Islam, Judaism, and Mormonism. But his particular obsession with the Catholic Church was notable for both its persistence and how it fell into near-total obsolescence among his fellow Protestants within just a few decades.

Chick was born in Los Angeles in 1924 and was drawn to devout faith while listening to The Old Fashioned Revival Hour, an evangelistic radio program, on his honeymoon. Inspired by 19th-century revival preacher Charles Finney, Chick directed his early cartoons at Christians who had grown complacent in their faith. His tracts can be mesmerizing in their blatant ugliness, both aesthetically and ideologically. In a tract on homosexuality, a gay dentist introduces his “wife,” Charles, to a classroom of aghast children, while grotesque devils frolic around the men; when an angelic young boy asks if the men are “queers,” his monstrous teacher threatens to send him to the principal.

Chick’s paranoia, his fascination with the devil, and his penchant for conspiracy theories found the perfect format in his tracts against Catholicism. In his telling, the Catholic Church is “The Great Whore,” a shadowy international organization that brainwashes believers and literally steals money from old ladies. In “The Death Cookie,” he lays out a complex story about the origins of the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist; it involves a scheming pope, the 16th-century Council of Trent, the ancient Egyptian sun god, and of course the overt involvement of Satan himself. Elsewhere, he traced the Catholic reverence for Mary back to a Babylonian witch and terms including priest and altar back to Judaism. (The papacy, in turn, inspired Islam.) And if you need to ask: Yes, Catholics in Chick’s universe are certainly going to hell “in the Whore’s clutches.”

Although Chick had an unusual knack for crystallizing anti-Catholic panic, he certainly didn’t invent it. Just last weekend, Hillary Clinton reflected on the country’s virulently anti-Catholic past in her speech at the Al Smith dinner, named for a Catholic former New York governor and 1928 Democratic nominee for president:

And when I think about what Al Smith went through, it’s important to just reflect how groundbreaking it was for him, a Catholic, to be my party’s nominee for president. Don’t forget—school boards sent home letters with children saying that if Al Smith is elected president, you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible. Voters were told that he would annul Protestant marriages. And … people even claimed the Holland Tunnel was a secret passageway to connect Rome and America, to help the pope rule our country.

Indeed, (non-Chick) cartoons during Smith’s unsuccessful campaign against Herbert Hoover showed the Democrat kneeling in deference to a cardinal, being “inflated” by the pope, and stocking his Cabinet with berobed clergymen. Echoing the fears of many, the Atlantic Monthly published an open letter asking whether Smith would be more loyal to Rome than to the United States.

Though Chick had to borrow money and start his own company to produce his tracts, the quantity of his output and the exuberance of his writing and illustrations gradually turned him into a figure of camp fascination. He produced his first tract in 1961; America had just inaugurated its new and glamorous first Catholic president, and Chick’s anti-Catholic fervor was already falling out of fashion. But if his retrograde fundamentalism was far outside the mainstream of American Christianity, he had a huge reach nonetheless. His tracts, nicknamed “chicklets,” were flimsy little rectangular booklets that churches and individuals were encouraged to purchase in bulk. (The tracts currently sell for 17 cents each;one back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests Chick didn’t make much money off them.) The idea was that Christians would carry the tracts with them and hand them out to nonbelievers everywhere they went. Though reports vary as to how many pamphlets the ministry has distributed over the years, everyone agrees it’s in the hundreds of millions.

Chick’s evangelistic method of sprinkling tracts around like Johnny Appleseed has largely fallen out of favor, as the evangelical magazine Christianity Today pointed out in its obituary for Chick. His approach to Catholicism, meanwhile, is so passé among Protestants that it can be read as almost confusing now. In a 2005 book on Protestant-Catholic relations called Is the Reformation Over?, authors Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom point out that Chick’s most notorious anti-Catholic comics were widely condemned by Protestants at the time, and evangelical news outlets quickly debunked many of his claims. “The hostilities that Jack Chick markets would have been well at home in the 1840s or 1890s,” they write. “Now they are on the margin.” It says something that at the Al Smith dinner, both candidates seemed more comfortable with New York’s archbishop than they were with each other. Chick would have been appalled by that. You might even say he’d be in hell.

Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2016/10/jack_chick_evangelist_cartoonist_and_anti_catholic_firebrand.html?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=83b5f9dc37-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_10_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-83b5f9dc37-400018169