Chick tracts!

I did my own little Chick tract parody in Finnish earlier, and now that I'm on the topic, I might as well say something about the original tracts themselves.

Jack Chick's "tracts" are little comic pamphlets on his premillenial dispensationalist, King James only -brand of Christianity. You can find the original tracts online here. They've been translated and distributed around the world to a surprising extent. My first contact with Jack Chick's work came at a Finnish rock festival in the '90s, where someone had left a translation of the Chick tract on Islam on our tent.

All the tracts are supposedly by Jack Chick, although given the variety of drawing styles on display one gets the impression some of the work is farmed out. They do all share his Protestant fundamentalism, in which all other religions and worldviews are irrevocably wrong, including all translations of the Bible except the King James V version. The tracts attack anything and everything, from the Catholic Church to Halloween.

One of the true classics is the hilarious tract on the evil of role-playing games, Dark Dungeons, from which the above is adapted. An excellent parody is Darque Dungeon. Similarly, Chick's unintentionally funny tract on evolution was parodied and debunked here.

Chick subscribes to the born-again Christian view, which basically holds that in order for your soul to be saved, you have to say some magical words to Jesus. This was excellently dissected in Somebody loves you?, which completes the story of the original Chick tract.

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The world of the Chick tracts is occasionally very strange. As I worked on my parody, I had to take a fairly close look at a bunch of them. One of the first tracts I ever read, in fact probably the second one after the Islam one, was Trust Me. It's a strange tract; a kid takes drugs for seemingly no reason and ends up in prison. After he prays to Jesus, he dies. It's a bit of a bummer.

Here's the unaltered first panel:

Seriously, what the hell is going on? Apparently there's an evil bus driving past, because someone is hanging what looks like a child from a window, and someone else is firing a gun. Maybe that's what Jack Chick thinks a city is like, I don't know. But for whatever reason, his tracts all have a weird sense of unreality; often the circumstances or actions of characters are just unbelievable, such as his idea of city life in the above panel, and even more so the fact that when a kid in that environment sees that hand beckoning to him, he follows it and does everything he's told.

In others, it's the total ignorance of the protagonists, who are almost invariably set up to convert to fundie Christianity:

Of course, it's either that or going to hell, also a popular topic:

Parodying Chick tracts is fun. Here's a panel I created for my parody, with my alterations and the original text.

After all, if you really want to know about the world we live in, read Why We're Here, a tract that tells you the truth.