Right, that’s it! I’m finishing this thing. Who cares about The Curse? So what if The Lawd thwarts my every move – hang on, I’d better bring you up to speed. I’m a few columns behind, leaving my hordes of slavering readers more slavering than usual and I should apologise to them and all the people they’re slavering on. But I have a good reason for this tardiness; The Curse of Jack Chick.
(Jack Chick, looking deceptively reasonable as he prepares to curse Floyd`s laptop)
I sat down a few weeks ago, planning to write a column about propaganda comics. I was reasonably sure that this was something I hadn’t touched on before and it was something I knew something about. It would be great. I would include that right-wing manga nutbagin Japan, the war time ‘buy bonds and beat Japs’ stuff over at superdickery.com. Heck, I could even rope in those Christian fundamentalist children’s books I used to chuckle over, the ones in which kids are always rescued from damning themselves eternally by watching a movie or dancing. I could even mention Jack Chick. I looked up some of Chick’s comics online and then The Curse struck.
To an impartial observer, The Curse might well look like ordinary procrastination. All that happened was that I stayed up until a very antisocial hour reading Chick’s creepy little tracts online and then went to bed. I thought so too, although I felt as though my brain needed a wash after reading the tracts. That’s normal.
(In Sodom, back-waxing was unknown)
However it was several weeks before I next had a bash. Again, I read one ‘tract’ about Catholics being really devil worshippers. Pretty loony stuff, thought I, and I read the one about the gay rights march which enlisted an evil cop to hospitalize a nice Christian protestor. Urgh. I read the other one about being a freemason and noticed that this was probably the only issue on which Pat Mills and Jack Chick would ever seem eye to eye (in Mills’ ‘Finn’ series, a thinly disguised version of the Masons is linked to an evil alien conspiracy). The curse struck again, this time taking the form of procrastination, a tough time at work and getting ready to go to Japan.
Now, another week on, I’m in Japan, writing this on an eleven year old Compaq laptop. I bet you didn’t know that there were laptops eleven years ago. This one is hanging on for dear life. The screen is a funny colour and the thing keeps shutting down. I now save after every other word. I don’t have a desk to write on and I’m in a house full of Japanese relatives who worry that I haven’t eaten enough battered fish. I’m exhausted from a day of smiling fixedly at polite people whose language I don’t speak. But I’m going to break the curse. When I finish the column, the invisible Jack Chick demon who has been making me dawdle will slink off looking disgusted, just like the demon that was inspiring the gay-friendly priest.
Say what? Well, for those who don’t know, Jack Chick is a very prolific author of little comic stories which can be held in the palm of one’s hand. All of these stories promote a rather loony version of Christianity; one in which the Creator of the Universe will dissapear if it turns out Darwin was right about evolution. This Creator also doesn’t like Muslims, Catholics or Mormons.
We see into this world via little stories of redemption. I’ve been seeing these things around since the sixties. They’re still around. Thanks to the net, you don`t have to brave the foyer of a fundamentalist church to read them. I know they are still around because I go to a Japanese language Christian church in Australia where somebody leaves a Japanese Chick tract about Evolution around. The somebody is a Creationist Paleontologist. I am not making this up.
It’s ironic that the Curse of Chick is operating on me, because we share a deity, Jack and I. I’m a Christian. To be specific, I’m an Anglican, inclining to the Protestant end of the spectrum. I pray and go to church, sometimes simultaneously. I mention this not out of any desire to turn the thousands of comic fans who hang on my every word into wishy washy Anglicans, but in a spirit of honesty. I’m declaring an interest here. Mind you, I think I’d find Jack Chick just as interesting and appalling if I were a Zoroastrian.
Chick and I part company on several things. Creationism seems to me to break the commandment about not bearing false witness, aka lying. The lie is the pretence of all creationists and the (very badly named) Intelligent Design buffs that they are merely being scientific and happen to have stumbled across some flaws in the idea of evolution which they are bringing to our attention. In fact, they start from the premise that it can’t be true that life evolves and that the world wasn’t whipped up in six days and that if this wasn’t true then there’s No God. I can’t see why the consequence of a truth should make it less true, although I can see why people would want to deny it. Personally, I believe in a God who did whatever God actually did. I wasn’t there when the cosmos was created, I just look that old. As for Catholics, I`m reasonably sure that they aren`t Babylonian devil worshippers. Catholic readers, do feel free to let me know either way.
Anyway, enough of that. I’m starting to sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury. Chick’s tracts follow a few simple narratives. Usually there’s a nice Christian guy and someone who is being deceived. The priest who thought gays were okay, was being mislead by a pointy horned transperent demon, visible only to the reader. The demon shoots through as soon as the Christian guy starts praying. At the end of the comic, the decived person either gets a chance to repent and follow Jesus, or, as often happens, they’re sent to hell by a blank faced Jesus, whilst wishing they’d repented when they’d had the opportunity (this happens to the nice Catholic guy”¦.Jesus sent him a Chick tract, but he still carried on being Catholic, so Hell it is). By the way, Chick never draws Christ’s face, leaving it blank. I’m not sure if this is because he thinks it’s blasphemous to depict Jesus or if he’s just tired of the way the Lord usually gets represented as a tired looking hippy. The tract usually finishes with a box you can check to let Jesus know you’ve been convinced by an eight page comic and have decided to turn your life and will over to Him.
A notable exception to the decieved-undecived-hell-tick box structure is a comic in which a creepy overweight science teacher is convinced of the wrongness of his ways by a bland but persistent Christian student. Using a combination of bad logic, straw-man attacks and biblical quotation , the kid convinces the rude teacher that evolution is wrong and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, although it’s been pointed out that Creationism is also consistent with the hypothesis that we were all dreamt up by a giant flying Spaghetti monster. The teacher goes to explain to Evolution headquarters (a small building considering all the evil they have to do) that he can’t go on and is dismissed in exactly the same words he used on the Christian kid (something like “Get out! If you apologise we might let you back in”) Irony is not dead.
Jack Chick isn’t dead either, although he’s kicking on. His legacy lives on too in `The Truth for Youth`,a sterling crew who produce flashy ‘manga style’ versions of Chick’s tracts. In these hip, with-it products, noxious Christian teens who look like Dragonball Z outcasts bully other kids out of evolution, non-Christian rock music and of course homosexuality. The gay kid gives it up so quickly as to make me think it was just a phase he was going through anyway. These people also sell a giant Christian bible/comic, with a beyond-parody video trailer, including the line “when people are coming out of their closets instead of cleaning them, it’s time to get God back in our schools”. Well quite. They can be found at http://www.truthforyouth.com/main.htm , so you go there and decide wether or not it`s for real.
Myself, although I`m a bit religious, I worry about the increasingly theocratic nature of the USA (and Australia, which follows America in all things). I tuned into the MTV awards a few years back to see every two-bit hip hopper thanking God for the personal interest He`d taken in their career. Now you know why there`s no peace in the Middle East. God is too busy supporting the American music scene.
Anyway, that`s the last of this column. I`ve broken the curse. The next one will be about something that doesn`t provoke God, as soon as I`ve worked out what doesn`t. Otherwise, I`ll wait until He`s busy with the MTV awards.
yours from Japan`s least comfortable net cafe)
