I OWE JACK

by Rev. Ivan Stang, Sacred Scribe, The Church of the SubGenius; president, The SubGenius Foundation, Inc.

As a religious tract pamphleteer myself, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the great Jack Chick. Without question, his work has been one of the foremost inspirations for my own. Furthermore, his unique approach to publishing has been a model that I only wish my outreach could emulate.

I was not raised in a particularly religious family, so religious matters were only a curiosity to me. The church kids seemed weirder to me than I myself was, and I was pretty weird. In high school I was taught comparative religion, but it all seemed rather dry. What finally got me really interested in religion were the less scholarly but more populist and down-home expressions of religious feeling -- crazy hollering radio evangelists, and lurid little prophecy pamphlets. Especially if they were loaded with great artwork depicting world destruction and titanic cosmic events!

The Jehovah's Witness publications feature some consistently excellent religious artwork, but for sheer storytelling, none can beat Jack Chick's. Even as an unrepentant mocker, I admired Chick's direct approach to story telling. He goes straight to the point, to the meat of the issue. Eliciting plain and basic emotions, he makes the threat to the soul seem real even to the doubter. At least for a while. In this respect I have to compare him to Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, the great televangelist -- another expert puppeteer of emotional strings (and another inspiration to me personally).

Recently a friend of mine brought me a gift of 5 copies of the classic Chick tract, "This Was Your Life" -- in 5 foreign language versions! Turkish, Farsi, Hindi, Serbian, and Armenian. I had never had the opportunity to compare the various versions of a single tract, and when I did so I was astounded at the attention to detail that Chick must lavish on each translation.

For instance, while the first pages of the Armenian, Serbian and Turkish versions are drawn like the English version, depicting the death of a smug, smiling, clean-shaven square with a pipe, in the Farsi version the hero is mustachioed and swarthy, and his cocktail has been changed to Turkish coffee. And he doesn't smoke. The Hindi version is completely re-drawn, showing the living man surrounded by relatives rather than possessions. When the Hindu man dies, there is no literal Grim Reaper figure shown sneaking up behind him. In the Hindi version alone, he does not rise from a grave when called, but from a bed. In following panels, where we normally see God as a faceless figure on a Heavenly Throne, the Hindu sees only the Throne. (Possibly there is a Hindu god or demon who is commonly depicted as a faceless human figure, and Chick wanted to avoid confusion.)

But in all versions, The Lake of Fire panel at the end is the same. The Lake of Fire does NOT change according to the potential reader's culture. The Lake of Fire is eternal.

Therein lies the vast, gigantic gulf between religious and secular comic books. In that eternally burning, unchanging Lake of Fire. There's the difference.

When I was a child, the artwork of Jack Kirby lured me into secular comics. But Jack Chick's work was possibly my first exposure to The Bible in written form. I must admit that at the time, I found super heroes of more interest than super deities. But as I grew older, gradually becoming a writer and publisher myself, which direction did I take? I followed Jack off the beaten path, veering off more towards God than Superman.

So, my personal thanks to Jack Kirby!

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Original file name: Jack Chick Essay - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44