Chick, who has been discussed countless times here, is the subject of an enormous cult following with shades from true believers to satirists with many in between, among the biggest of which are the affectionate-but-ironic kitsch fans, who have a complex site for collectors and critics. He was born in about 1929 and grew up in SoCal when that was a quiet part of the world. He was a shallow, silly child who swore in high school and goofed off but wasn’t a delinquent. He served in Okinawa and came home mentally scared, married a woman from a Baptist family and finally fell to his knees in a dramatic scene he potrays over and over, accepting Jesus at the urging of his in-laws and a radio preacher. They then told him their version of what a Christian is and does.
He was looking for a way to serve the Lord. All he was especially good at was a certain goofy, loose-jointed kind of drawing and heavy-handed dialogue printing, which he had picked up by immersion in ealry 20th Century war cartoons, and he knew the Communists in China as well as a church group closer to home had great success with the slow-and-steady-image-bombardment style of persuasion using low-grade but collectible themed comic books. He decided to print tracts in comic form using the same goofy, over-the-top style and repetition of themes and images.
About 10 or 15 years into this, it was 1970, and a friend of his came to his door leading a nervous, formal, shy, short, polite man – who matched Chick’s apparent self-image uncannily, a psychological trick every salesman knows. His name was Alberto Rivera, he said, and the Vatican was looking for him. He worked on the cartoonist for a long time, telling an increasingly bizarre story (another mind-control trick – don’t reveal the whole story at once, start off believeable and get a sign of agreement and teaming, before going into the real weirdness, step-by-step). He was actually a con man who had creditors after him, but he said he was a former Jesuit who had been imprisoned and almost killed for revealing that he was helping infiltrate, destroy by scandal, and take names down at evangelical churches for a new inquisition. After the cartoonist accepted the story, the fugitive asked if he could stay a while, for safety you see, and if Chick’s new artist would draw him a book to tell his story? Soon he was basically dictating what the tract company did. He was the one actually running the operation, gulling the artists.
His mind warped by paranoia, Chick then accepted all kinds of characters as expert winesses to conspiracies and other horrors. “Ex” witch John Todd. “Rebecca Brown”, “M.D”, and her ward, Elaine, on the road to spring millions from a giant satanic cult that uses drawings and pets to keep tabs on everyone. Dave Hunt, Bill Schoebelen (a real ex-witch, but those who know him say he pushed his way to places of rank at high speed and then left groups to do the same elsewhere, then thought everyone else was as pushy and power-hungry as he was). On and on, people like them saw him coming a mile away.
To understand the Chickiverse one must understand the paranoid world of most of his followers, rural ultraconservative Baptists reared to fear anything complex or alluring, anything that could attract them. They are telling the truth when they say they don’t exactly hate anyone. They just fear everyone, because they can’t trust themselves. They know how easily overwhelmed they are. If rock-and-roll is all it takes to put confusing thoughts in their heads, they are sure it is much worse for others, if anything, and should be stopped. If they have such awful rebellious feelings when they wear jeans, and can’t read the blurb of a Potter book without feeling the allure of witchcraft, why, they are sure, everyone else must be helpless before such lures. So they set about to simplify the world, to protect the public from what they can’t handle. Of course paranoia lit appeals to them.
So, in a strange way, Chick Tracts played a big part in my becoming Catholic.
I wonder if a man his age can be deprogrammed? He’s about 80 now.
