I love reading Jack Chick’s comics. They have always been a source of inspiration and humor for me. Being a Roman Catholic, I certainly don’t agree with Chick’s fundamentalist version of Christianity (in Chick’s view I’ll be in hell unless I convert), but I do enjoy reading and collecting his comics, which are distributed by various churches and sidewalk evangelists.

An Albanian translation of Chick's seminal This Was Your Life

When I lived in Boston and went to Emerson College, there was a mentally disturbed guy (he was mentally disturbed, not simply on fire with the love of Christ) who used to stand outside of the main building on 80 Boylston with an End is Nigh sandwich board, proclaiming God’s Kingdom. He carried the tracts, which depending on how you order, range from about .10-.30 cents a pop.

That was my first introduction to the Chick tract, I think.

In the hot and sweaty summer of 2001, after moving to Brooklyn, my roommate and I would collect them, usually from subway trains, although there was a magazine store that sold them for irony value somewhere on the Lower East Side.

It was at See Here, the store, that I was introduced to some of the finest works in Jack Chick’s cannon: Death Cookie, Dark Dungeons, Reverend Wonderful, and Where’s Rabbi Waxman to name a few. No longer did I have to wait to be prostelityzed to, but could purchase them and so I did.

I’ll share with you some of my favorite Chick Tracts and I’d like to start with Doomtown.

Doomtown is of course a statement on homosexuality and if a fundamentalist cartoonist was going to get his point across, there’s no better way than this one, with it’s over-the-top (I suppose depending on where you live) depictions of homosexual men. They’re not so much fabulous as they are predatory. They’re the kinda guys either Chick feared running into in rest stop bathrooms or intentionally ran into in reststop bathrooms.

Let me share some frames:

I really love this one. You don’t get the best view of them, but if you look closely you can see Chick’s attention to detail.

Check out the guy who is six from the left. He looks as if he’s wearing a sleaveless dress and long earings with Coke bottle glasses. I like him even better than the one who is second from the right, with the policeman hat (more on that later).

Here’s another two frames I like. I mostly like it for the hairy bear with the leather and spikes and the policeman hat, but the guy with Bible is cool too. He looks a little like Charles Bronson.

This one on the right is amazing and speaks for itself. I love the permed queen with the Rollie Fingers stache and the hook earings making out with someone who is either sweating or has horrid moles on his face.

And last but not least is this one.

You know, because homosexuals molest kids all the time.

Now, all of the joking aside (I’m not sure anything I’ve written is actually funny), I think these comics are funny but speak to a horrible paranoia on the part of the artist or artists. I’m not sure Jack Chick actually drew this one but if he did you can see it is inspired by a deep fear, basically a phobia of gay life. I love the backhair on that one guy!

If you’ve never read a Chick Tract, I suggest you do now. I think they’re a lot of fun!