Chick: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
ArchPundit
Jack Chick continues his paranoid rantings in cartoon form with this gem that pretty much attacks everything except his particular brand of premillennial dispensationalism. Of course, he sells it as a positive message:
The Checklist
United Nations–check
Catholics and Idol Worship AKA The Whore of Babylon and the Pope in particular–Check
Main Stream Protestantism–Check
Bible Colleges–Check
Masonry–Check
Sodomy–Check
Islam–Check
Billy Graham–Check
Evolution didn’t make the cut this time.
By most accounts, Chick’s Heaven is going to be mighty small.
The Bloviator feeds my Chick amusement with an article from LA Magazine.
One terrifying fact:
With more than 500 million copies of his 142 books in print, including translations in more than 100 languages, Chick is the world’s most published living author.
Welcome to the face of America!
Just how paranoid is the man:
In 1979, Chick and Carter embarked on a series of Crusaders comics about the life of Alberto Rivera. According to the comics, Rivera was a former Jesuit priest who had left the Catholic Church in 1967 after discovering the Vatican’s plans for world domination (as well as its involvement in the Holocaust, the Jonestown massacre, and the rise of communism). Christian bookstores refused to stock them, and Catholic organizations claimed that Rivera had never been a Jesuit priest. In 1981, Chick quit the Christian Booksellers Association, stating that the Catholic Church had infiltrated the organization.
During this period, Chick became involved with a number of questionable characters. In 1984, he publicly supported the ministry of Tony Alamo, an L.A.-based cult leader who has been accused over the years of tax evasion, felony child abuse, and the theft of his late wife’s corpse. In 1978, he based his antiwitchcraft comic Spellbound on the allegations of "former Grand Druid" Johnny Todd, who claimed that Satanists throughout the United States were routinely engaging in human sacrifice. Todd was later exposed as a fraud. Meanwhile, pastors and churches continued to denounce Chick and his tracts. "The churches thought he was just another crackpot," says Richard Lee, a former minister and longtime friend of Chick. "I think that hurt his feelings a lot."
Despite the criticism, Chick kept up his anti-Catholic rants. According to Fuller Theological Seminary evangelism professor Chapman Clark, as mainstream Evangelicals in the 1950s moved away from fire-and-brimstone tactics to a softer approach to soul gathering, Chick’s message became stuck in time. "The tracts really reflect the church’s separatist, we/they mentality of the ’50s," says Clark. "I don’t think that [the tracts] have evolved with a sensitivity to where the culture has gone." While Chick managed to skewer just about all of the world’s major religions over the years, he saved his most hate-filled language for the Vatican, a reflection of the fundamentalist movement’s long-standing animosity toward the Catholic Church. For many of Chick’s ilk, the Inquisition is recent history, the existence of the Illuminati indisputable fact.
To add to it, he thinks the Jesuits are out to get him:
Everyone who has met Chick has his own theories about his reclusive nature. "He really is a shy person," says Lee. Kuersteiner feels that Chick genuinely fears for his life: "He has stated in the past that the Jesuits would gladly see him dead if they could arrange it."
The JESUITS!
But there lies the contradiction–if the ‘Whore of Babylon’ really was that powerful, they could have done away with him some time ago.