Jack Chick, that is. For those not in the know, Mr. Chick is infamous for creating little illustrated booklets (popularly known as “Chick tracts”) that claim you’ll go to Hell if you don’t follow his particular interpretation of Christianity. If you go to his website, which I’m not linking to for obvious reasons, you’ll even see that he advises passing out his tracts with candy on Halloween in order to “save” children from the holiday.
Enterthejabberwock.com has done several examinations of Chick’s work that humorously and informatively tear apart the numerous flaws in his arguments, storylines, and artwork in a NSFW manner. I especially love the dissections of the Halloween-themed tracts, the first of which is called “Here, Kitty Kitty!” and deals with evil knock-offs of the Peanuts gang who want to sacrifice a cat on Halloween.
The next tract is “The Devil’s Night” and Chick’s terrible research skills are glaring in this one. Not only does he completely botch the spelling of “Samhain,” but he also fails to realize that pumpkins weren’t even used the way he claims they were back then. If Mr. Chick can’t even get those simple details correct, why should he expect anyone to believe any of the other “facts” in his work?
The final one is called “Boo!”, a failed attempt at a horror movie parody. It’s slightly more accurate than “The Devil’s Night,” but it still provides a wildly inaccurate take on the origins of Halloween. I’ve heard that Jack Chick recently released another Halloween-themed tract and I can only hope it gets the Enterthejabberwock treatment sometime soon.
UPDATE: The dissection of the newest Halloween tract is now up. “First Bite” is Jack Chick’s attempt at a campy vampire story. As you can imagine, the results aren’t pretty.
