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Discover Mid-America — June 2004

The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick, by Kurt Kuersteiner. Schiffer Publishing, ISBN 0764318926, Price: $29.95

Deconstructing Chick

Here’s what I remember most about growing up in the 70s: dread. Outside the classroom windows, the wind was always blowing either snow or dust. Once you and your inscrutable math homework made it home past the bully’s house, there was Walter Cronkite reading the bad news just before another supper of hamburger, steamed potatoes and the canned vegetable closest to the edge of the shelf. And hanging over all of this was the prospect of Eternal Damnation.

Yes, by golly, those were the days.

My youthful eschatological dread was fortified by a charming little 3x5 comic book titled This Was Your Life. In it, a smug guy with a great car is visited by the Grim Reaper and, blammo, finds himself face to face with (you guessed it) Eternal Damnation. He thinks he’s lived an okay life and asks why he’s not going to Heaven. He is shown the error of his ways before being tossed naked into the Lake of Fire for some wailing and teeth gnashing.

Being a baptized member of a Baptist church, I should have taken solace in the book. But I secretly aspired to an okay life and so the book scared the hell out of me. This was exactly what the book’s author, an actor turned tract artist named Jack T. Chick, had in mind.

Since the early 60s, Chick and his collaborators at Chick Publications in Ontario, Calif., have been churning out tracts, Crusader Comics and the newspaper Battle Cry, all of which are filled to popping with dire warnings about the ills of modern society and the multiple, overlapping conspiracy of Satan’s helpers: the Catholic Church, Masons, witches, homosexuals and, well, pretty much everyone who doesn’t agree with Jack T. Chick.

Like Chick, we took the idea of eternal damnation seriously in our house. This may explain why my older siblings were so eager to move out. I also moved out and over the years the world gradually became a more complicated place. Now comes Kurt Kuersteiner to remind us just how complicated the world can be with his remarkably even-handed new book, The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick.

Kuersteiner is the vice president of the Chick Tracts Club and a contributor to www.chickcomics.com, a web site for collectors of what might be called Chickiana. This is what makes the book remarkable to me. Collectors, no matter how passionate, are like scientists, are always coming back around to the empirical: How rare is it, what condition is it in, how much has someone else paid for it? Add to this the focus on preservation and you've got a mindset that save the world — or at least the one we all live in.

Kuersteiner’s book is admirable for its dispassionate, at times ironic, but never dismissive treatment of the pointedly divisive work of a very un-P.C. artist. We get a brief biography of Jack T. Chick, who turns out to be not surprisingly a bit of a recluse and mediaphobe. There’s a section on Chick imitators and parodies, another section with feedback from fans and critics and even a guide to creating your own tracts. The bulk of the book is taken up with illustrated reviews of tracts and comics (by Kuersteiner and other contributors) along with their estimated values. The book closes with “A Visit to Chick Publications,” an account of the author’s trip to meet Jack T. Chick himself. Not surprisingly, the highlight for collector Kuersteiner turns out to be the warehouse. (“It was the Fort Knox of Chick tracks!”)

My dread about the afterlife has diminished over the years, but after reading The Unofficial Guide to the Art of Jack T. Chick I have acquired one new regret: That copy of This Was Your Life could bring in as much as $200 today. Bless my soul.

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