Chris Ray - August 31st, 2008 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

If you have ever been accosted in the subway, on a bus, or in an airport by a disheveled evangelist passing out little credit card-sized comic books about Jesus, or if you have ever been browsing through books about science, religion, or atheism at your local bookstore and suddenly a little booklet entitled “This Was Your Life” falls out of God is Not Great or The God Delusion, then you have experienced the work of famous Christian evangelist Jack T. Chick firsthand. Perhaps you have read some of his delicious works on evolution on the internet, or read some of the parodies of his anti-Dungeons and Dragons screed “Dark Dungeons.” Almost a billion of these booklets have been distributed by missionaries and evangelists ever since Chick started writing, drawing, and printing his own tracts decades ago, and odds are that if you haven’t seen one yet, you probably will in the future.

Chick’s online catalog has dozens of different tracts, but it is unlikely that you will see any of his recent works in the outstretched hand of your friendly neighborhood evangelist. Chick, who is now 84, has not been producing works of the same “quality” as his most famous tract “This Was Your Life” for years. In fact, given the complete ridiculousness of some of his most recent tracts, it may be time to speculate on whether Mr. Chick is in fact in a state of mental decline.

Chick’s first tract, “Why No Revival?,” is a lucid, by-Christians-for-Christians story of a young man who is turned on to Jesus by an anonymous evangelist and who then undertakes a career of “reviving” Protestant churches that have gone astray, much to the chagrin of the demons who try to tempt him off the path of piety throughout the story (his second tract, “A Demon’s Nightmare,” is almost exactly the same story). “This Was Your Life,” which Chick’s site claims has alone sold almost a hundred million copies worldwide, is an almost entirely scriptural appeal to existential terror of death, and to find Jesus before it’s too late.

His most recent tract, by contrast, is a garbled mess. “First Bite,” which was released the day before this writing, is the almost incomprehensible story of a Satanic coven that is waiting for some kind of demonic anti-messiah named Igor. Igor is born, raised by “dragon masters, grand lodge leaders and ‘9 unknown men,’” and when he comes of age, Satan himself tells the coven that little Igor has to have his “first bite” of human flesh before he can take over the world (why this is the case is not made clear). The coven just happens to pick an innocent young evangelical Christian woman as the victim, Igor moves in for the kill, the woman shouts some Bible passages at him, and then Igor’s fangs magically disappear, he converts to Christianity, and the coven goes into panic-mode when Satan shrugs and says he was lying about Igor all along.

The tract before that, “Who Is He?” appears to be a normal Chick tract: it is a scripture-filled general summary of evangelical theological beliefs about who Jesus was, replete with straw-man unbelievers who say things like “Jesus was Buddha’s cousin” and a filthy, tattooed biker who says that Jesus was a “hoax.”

This tract, however lucid it appears to be, is suspiciously bereft of new material. As someone who has been collecting these tracts for some time, I notice that it has almost no illustrations that have not appeared in previous Chick tracts, and even its story arc completely breaks the Chick formula: in most Chick tracts, there is the wise servant of Jesus and the confused, laughably gullible or uninformed nonbeliever, and often there is a third character (usually either a demon, a scientist, or a Catholic) who tries to lead the gullible non-Christian astray. The stories are usually tug-of-war fables that end up with somebody in hell, somebody in heaven, and a hasty message about how to find Jesus. “Who Is He?” has none of that. Even “This Was Your Life” has the wise angel and the duped unsaved man, whereas “Who Is He?” has no actual characters, dialogue, or particularly useful message of any kind “Who Is He?” is mostly just a regurgitation of previous Chick material, both visually and textually, and so it is quite likely that Chick himself did very little “new” work on this one.

Like “First Bite,” Chick’s third-to-most-recent tract, “There Go the Dinosaurs,” provides strong evidence that all is not right in Chick’s mind, or certainly at least that the quality of his writing and drawing has diminished significantly. “Dinosaurs” is, like “First Bite,” completely incomprehensible and incredibly childish. It tells the story of the last dinosaur (whose thoughts we can read in little bubbles) who tries to hide from a vaguely Middle Ages-ish tribe of hunters by (and this is not a joke) hiding her head in a cloud. The story moves gracelessly into a laughably unsubstantiated tirade about evolution (but only after the inexplicable exclamation that the “dino-burgers” eaten by the hunters took “36 trips! to scavenge from poor Ms. Dinosaur’s corpse) and then closes with the familiar “Heaven or Hell? – Your Choice” page about how to find Jesus.

Of his last three tracts, two are complete messes and one is recycled, and may not even have been written by Chick himself given the oddities in its narrative structure. Has this once-great evangelist, who claims to have saved millions of souls worldwide, simply lost his touch? Or is he in a genuine state of decline?

Jack Chick is 84 this year. The quality of his writing is down, his new stories (when he does write stories) are so incomprehensible and so silly an objective observer would be tempted to view them as parodies. There is nothing in his last three tracts that is even plausibly mistakable for the familiar, modern-day, real-life stories of Christians and unbelievers duking it out for spiritual control of the undecided. Instead, all that is left is an old man telling stories about vampires and dinosaur hunters. His advanced age and diminished creative capacities lead me to believe that it won’t be long before we see the final Chick tract, and we have certainly seen the last legible, new one.

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Tags: chick tracts, christianity, Comic, drawings, Evangelism, jack chick, jesus, salvation, senile, this was your life