Actually, I kind of wish I had a collection of them. It’s sort of a perverse fascination with anti-Catholic pathology. Chick is the King!
I have a whole collection of them.
I also have a personal experience with Jack T Chick that proves that at one time, he wasn’t the jerk that many of you think he is.
But I’ve already described that in another thread on this forum a year ago.
I think that in the last few years, Pastor Chick has slipped out of the bounds of reality. He is accepted by very few Protestants, although many of his tracts are still used in evangelical settings.
Laugh if you wish, but it is a fact that most people in the U.S. read at a 6th grade reading level or LOWER.
JTC’s motto is "CHICK TRACTS GET READ!
And he’s right. People who don’t (or can’t) read books like
Imitation of Christ or
City of God or even the Bible will pick up a fun little comic book with clever pictures and good puns and read through it and remember it.
How many of you remember a single chapter of
Imitation of Christ? But many of you can recite the plot of Holy Joe or Bewitched or This Was Your Life, can’t you?
I personally find a lot of the Chick illustrations very good, like an old-fashioned comic book. I don’t know a lot about art, but I think these are what you would call “sensationalist” or “yellow journalism.” You can see a lot of this kind of art in old turn-of-the century newspapers. Very lurid and exaggarated, especially the faces. Hey, so I’m not very classy when it comes to art (I do love Michelangelo’s Pieta!) But I happen to think that the Chick pics are cool. I certainly can’t draw as well!
And I also think a lot of the “plots” are pretty clever. There are movies out there that don’t have plots as good as many of the Chick comics, but because hunky actors and sexy actresses star in them, people pay twelve bucks and ooh and ahh and hand them Oscars and Golden Globes. And those movies do a lot more harm in our culture and are a lot more insulting to Christianity than the Chick tracts!
Perhaps instead of criticizing Chick, Catholics should create their own little fun and pithy comic books instead of handing potential converts a 500 page Catechism and a 1000 page Bible and a stack of papal encyclicals and the documents of the various Church Councils including Vatican II and saying, “Here ya go–just read these and you’ll understand Christianity!”
Wow. I thought it was pretty annoying when someone at my place of employment left these laying around, but it’s really annoying when there’s one in your mailbox!!
