I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse

1 8 2 Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse The Prophet Margin chick tracts are ammonium nitrate for the soul, an incendiary mix of blood ’n’ guts Bible-thumping, paleoconservatism , millenarian visions in the Late Great Planet Earth mold, and what conspiracy scholars call “fusion paranoia”—that altered state in which history’s unsolved mysteries suddenly resolve themselves into a unified field theory of fear and loathing. If the name Jack T. Chick draws a blank look, the sight of a Chick “illustrated gospel tract” almost inevitably inspires the shock of recognition . They’re those ubiquitous little comic-booklets, not much bigger than a playing card, that fundamentalist Christians have been using to booby-trap park benches, bathroom stalls, and trick-or-treaters ’ candy bags since the late 1950s. In Chick’s parallax worldview, homosexuals are plotting to poison our nation’s blood supply with the AIDS virus. Rock music, whose demonic beat was first thumped out by the Druids on people-skin drums,is driving teenagers to commit suicide in the misguided belief that “Hell will be party time.” Witches are everywhere, guzzling the blood of sacrificed infants and blessing rock tapes while cavorting naked. In the center of Chick’s tangled web of conspiracy theories hangs the Catholic Church, like a poison-bloated black widow. Its Illuminati control the vast wealth amassed during the Inquisition; its Mafia oversees the church’s criminal enterprises. Chick tracts are a cultural gene-splice of the religious tract (whose modern incarnation is at least as old as the founding of the American 1 8 3 T H E P R O P H E T M A R G I N Tract Society in 1825) and the comic book (specifically, Maoist agitprop booklets, by Chick’s own, incredible admission).1 According to comics critic Daniel K. Raeburn, Chick is “the most underground of all underground cartoonists—and yet he’s one of the most successful cartoonists ever in terms of readership (four hundred million sold!).”2 God-given talent has little to do with it. Chick’s draftsmanship is amateurish, at best crudely effective, at worst eye-gougingly awful. However, Fred Carter, the artist who illustrated the best of the ’70s Chick tracts, is as accomplished as Chick is inept, masterfully exploiting the dramatic punch of chiaroscuro and cinematic POVs. In “The Holy Book of Chick,” the 1998 issue of his self-published ’zine of comics criticism The Imp, Raeburn rhapsodizes about Carter’s use of “the Filipino inking style”—“quivering heads and fists, boldly crosshatched backgrounds”—associated with DC horror-comic artists like Jesus Jodloman.3 In many ways, Chick tracts are horror comics. The lost soul tormented by Boschian monstrosities in Back from the Dead? and the gore-soaked crucifixion scene in The Empty Tomb will be instantly familiar to anyone whose adolescent nightmares were staged and Chick tract. T H E P R O P H E T M A R G I N 1 8 4 scripted by DC’s House of Secrets or, as Chick’s may have been, by earlier comics such as EC’s Vault of Horror. Of course, Jack Chick wasn’t the first to strike a Faustian bargain, in the name of reaching the unsaved masses, between moral uplift and lurid sensationalism. In 1791, the Episcopal minister Mason Locke Weems wrote and peddled tracts such as The Drunkard’s Looking Glass, which featured a drunkard falling off his horse, a mishap that left him with one eye “cleanly knocked out of its socket; and, held only by a string of skin, there it lay naked on his bloody cheek.”4 Weems illustrated his tracts with engravings of shattered skulls and strangled corpses, their tongues bulging: a Tales from the Crypt for god-fearers, with a scriptural flourish to justify the Grand Guignol. In Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture, the historian R. Laurence Moore characterizes Weems’s tracts as the “marriage of aggressive marketing with a moral mission,” a description that neatly fits Chick’s “soul-winning” tracts, ballyhooed with catchphrases like “Chick tracts make witnessing easy!” and “Chick tracts get read!”5 Chick’s booklets are true to their roots in horror-comic morality plays and the penny-dreadful sensationalism of Weems’s “edifying” tales.Chick’s early comic This Was Your Life! (1958) is the ur-tract,the narrative die Chick...