The world may be on fire, but you know what’s burning ever hotter? Jack Chick’s religious paranoias. Dead though he may be, Jack Chick’s strange preoccupations remain, animating his body of work like a fundamentalist lich. Fundamentalich?
Anyway, making fun of this weird old maniac is evergreen, so here are six more of Jack Chicks’s most hilariously misguided religious comics.
Bad Bob!
Y’all know Bad Bob? He’s like the protagonist of every Jim Croce song ever written, and he just loves to sell drugs to YOUR COMMUNITY. If Walking Tall had a final boss, it would be Bad Bob out there having an axe handle duel with Joe Don Baker. Weirdly enough for a creator with such a preoccupation with personified evil, Bad Bob’s secret origin is permissive parenting. The Jack Chick universe is one where literal antichrists pop up all the time, but no, Bob’s mom just failed to lay down the law when he was a fussy infant. First there’s crying, then dumping strained peas on the floor, then Dennis the Menace garden hose antics, and then dumping drinks on the heads of waitresses.
Bob is eventually arrested and held at a local jail, where he is warned about Hell before nearly dying in a suspiciously timely fire. Bob repents, but there’s a hilarious postscript where Bob’s former clients specifically say that they’re just going to find a new dealer. Remember kids, God wants you to leave money on the table.
Immortal Dialogue: “Let me tell you something. I hate God, and if I had the chance, I’d pull Him out of Heaven!”
All God’s Creatures
This is one of those tracts where the disparate elements never really come together in a satisfying way. There’s a miserable shithead grandpa and a dull kid named Sam who thinks he has to save the souls of his toys. Grandpa overhears the boy preaching, bing bang bong, story over. But I want to talk about Jack Chick’s absolutely wild conception of what toys look like. What are these things? Was Sam one of the kids who got Misfit Toys at the end of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
I think Jack really missed an opportunity to address the “living toy” trope here, and I feel like Jack Chick’s take on Toy Story would be fascinating. The toys are sentient, but are they ensouled? Is Woody going to Hell if he doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and is Andy at fault for not making the word of God available to interested toys? Is Buzz Lightyear a false prophet? Will Borscht Belt-ass Mr. Potato Head inexplicably be the villain of the piece?
Immortal Dialogue: “Mom called you creatures, so I’m gonna preach to you guys! Don’t be scared, Mr. Frog.”
Back From the Dead?
Every once in a while, Jack does one of these that, if not for the ham-fisted religious ending, could pass for a ghoulish short from the golden age of EC Comics. I guess it makes sense. Religion is steeped in horror, from The Omen to Heironymous Bosch. This one deals with a guy who dies, experiences Hell for 15 minutes, and then wakes up desperately begging for a priest to save him before he dies again and is eternally damned.
The Twilight Zone ending would have him work himself into a panic and scare himself to death right before the priest walks in, but he gets listlessly saved here. Jack actually whiffs a lot of this one, outside of the interesting premise; we only get two panels of Hell, and about a dozen of a guy sitting in a hospital bed making Hell sound boring as shit.
It’s also notable for having a Jesus who looks exactly like Jason Mantzoukas.
Immortal Dialogue: “It was dark down there. I was in some kind of a room … I couldn’t believe it.”
Bewitched?
Jack Chick’s concept of Satan is so weird. Sometimes he wants him to be an utterly inscrutable force of inhuman evil, and sometimes he wants him to be some guy with a Van Dyke who loves Nick at Nite. The wildest thing about this one is that it doesn’t even imply that Bewitched was itself a product of the Devil, only that its enduring popularity has been a real boon for the legions of Hell. Elizabeth Montogomery >> astrology >> Dungeons and Dragons >> an enormous coal-black satyr rampaging across America and jizzing on the Washington Monument, or whatever specific thing Jack is afraid of.
In this case, he’s afraid that a girl named Ashley is going to die in an LSD coma before she can wake up and get saved. Things are going well for Team Evil, but even the power of two disparate Darrins is not enough to overcome that most powerful of holy weapons: grandma prayers. Grandma prayers are the Spirit Bomb of the Jack Chick comics universe. Ashley dies but doesn’t go to Hell, while Satan presumably checks the books to see if I Dream of Jeannie is occult enough for him to tacitly take credit for.
Cats
No, not that Cats, though I can’t begin to tell you how fervently I wish Jack Chick had lived long enough to get a hateful, confusing boner over a nude feline Idris Elba. This is actually just a bone-dry re-telling of Daniel in the lions’ den. You know the one: Man of God is cast into a room filled with starving lions, but they don’t eat him, and such and like. The real interesting part of this is how even when he’s doing a straight biblical retelling, Chick’s bizarre idiosyncrasies can’t help but shine though. To wit:
-Daniel looks weirdly like Ricardo Montalban, and he’s wearing this robe with tracksuit stripes that makes him look like an extremely slavic wizard.
-There’s a panel depicting the madness of King Nebuchadnezzar. Not weird. Jack has illustrated this by making Nebuchadnezzar a nude man with rippling muscles on all fours with a leash around his neck. Definitely weird.
-The Persians brainstorm ways to embroil Daniel in scandal including “sex problems.” Not sure what kind of leverage you’re going for when the king is confirmed into pet play.
-This is a story about a noble Israelite contending with evil, scheming Persians; guess which ones he draws to look stereotypically Jewish?
Immortal Dialogue: “This time, let’s drink to Ishtar … (hic) my favorite golden goddess!”
Crazy Wolf
Longtime Chickists will tell you that ol’ Jack is never on thinner theologic ice than when he starts talking about the religious traditions of non-white folks. The poor guy can barely get through a critique of Catholicism without flipping his shit and calling the pope a vampire or whatever, so you can imagine how well he does when it’s time to tell a story set on the res. This one concerns Crazy Wolf, a skinwalker and witch hired by a native lady named Margaret who’s pissed that her neighbor has abandoned their tribe’s traditional religion for Christianity. In response, Crazy Wolf summons the titular monster from Curse of the Demon and prepares to lead a diabolical assault on Mary’s cabin. Hilariously, Crazy immediately gets his shit kicked in by a literal angel and has his satanic powers revoked. But never fear, because as always there is a happy ending. A comically bandaged-up Crazy Wolf repents, immediately gets shot by Margaret, dies, and goes to Heaven. Margaret also dies and goes to Hell, off-panel.
Honestly? Questions of gross religious misrepresentation aside, this one is pretty dope. As much as he would probably deny it, I think Chick probably relished the chance to draw wild shit like a fistfight between a skinwalker and an angel. It’s a pity that the man was so utterly paranoid about tabletop gaming because he probably would have been a first-class DM.
Immortal Dialogue: “Your God has white skin!” “Jesus wasn’t a white man. He was a Jew!”
