This 356-page book, one part graphic novel and the other part chapters from The New Testament, is intended to be given to teenagers. The first hundred pages are color comics, mostly competently drawn short stories that address teenage sexuality, alcohol, drugs, abortion, religious pluralism, and evolution from the standard buzzkill fundy school of childrearing.
At the end of the comics section is a black-and-white comics page consisting of two contrasting images of supposed school discipline applied to Christians but not to violent criminals. The top panel consists of thuggish weapon-wielding teenagers in the hall, one with a t-shirt of a monkey captioned with "My Ancestor"; another wears a "Drugs" shirt, and the third has a long knife; the lone female has a "Sex" tattoo on her arm; this panel has led to a viral phenomenon.
People on Twitter and other social media sites and have wrongly claimed this is the work of Jack Chick and that the image is from a Chick tract or comic book. Before I knew the source of this panel, I knew it wasn't Chick's work but Chick and the unknown artist have an over-the-top fundamentalist view of the world and the monkey-ancestor shirt is similar to the painting of the ape captioned "Our Father" behind the professor in the classic creationist Chick tract "Big Daddy?"
The book is a witnessing project of Dr. Tim Todd of West Monroe, Louisiana. The accompanying promo pamphlet has endorsements from televangelist T.D. Jakes and The Gipper's son, right-wing talk show host Michael Reagan whose daddy made 1983 "The Year of the Bible" (the museum has an 80s giveaway book dedicated to this supposedly special year).
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
"You Will Be There!" is a 6-page fold-out comic book done by Life Messengers around 1980 (which is around the time Life Messengers went out of business). Unlike previous Life Messenger comic book tracts that had a format similar to Chick tracts, this one is a short unstapled pamphlet. It shows an unremarkable debate between a white guy skeptic in a business suit and an unseen believer/narrator. The only interesting elements of the tract are the usual good artwork by veteran comic book artist Deryl Skelton (who also drew Life Messenger's "The Lonely Cabin on the 40-Mile" which was featured by the museum here) and an unintentionally funny panel about evolution (see below). The story of Life Messenger is here.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
Creative indie comics auteur Davidt Dunlop made a wickedly clever tract "Satanic Panic" starring breakout character Baphometta who serves as a kick-ass force of vengeance when some cruel schoolchildren torment a young girl. Baphometta is a schoolgirl version of French fabulist Léo Taxil's fanciful character behind the Freemasons, the anthropomorphic demon Baphomet. There's even a tie-in: a groovy Baphometta doll!
When the museum received the Baphometta package in the mail, I was pleasantly surprised to have also received a Baphometta card; the doll was wrapped in black paper and wrapped with a bow and Baphometta tag. I give the tract/card/doll combo my highest recommendation. You can order them here.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
Jack Chick's work has been parodied by some of the best people in the comics scene: Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Ivan Brunetti, Johnny Ryan and many others. Check out the far-from-exhaustive Chick Tract Parody Page for more. However, I believe "The Collector" is the best overall Chick tract parody. Written by Kurt Kuersteiner, the creator of the Jack T. Chick Museum of Art website; the art is by underappreciated alternative comics creator Harry S. Robins.
Kuersteiner's story is easily the most thorough parody in terms of addressing the many diverse elements of Chick's worldview. The primary Chick work satirized is the tract "Somebody Goofed" but many characters, elements, and themes from other tracts have cameo appearances such as "Angels?" "The Last Generation," "The Gay Blade," "A Demon's Nightmare," "The Beast," and the top-selling Chick tract "This Was Your Life." "The Collector" doesn't just demonstrate a wealth of knowledge about Chickesque thought but it's also funny as shit. Robins' artwork does a fine job of mimicking Chick's style. Like Chick, Robins does a lot of crosshatching. Kuersteiner and Robins are a great combo.
The comic is chapter 13 in Kuersteiner's 2004 book The Unofficial Guide to The Art of Jack T. Chick: Chick Tracts, Crusader Comics, and Battle Cry Newspapers.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
Some observers have claimed that the secretive right-wing Catholic organization push to deny President Biden communion. I don't know if that's true but it lead me to realize that I have none of their literature so I requested some. I received an envelope in the mail yesterday and it's really, really, really boring stuff. There are booklets about founder Saint Josemaria Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás and Father Joseph Muzquiz who established the group in the United States and other countries. Mark Twain called The Book of Mormon "chloroform in print." The same can be said about this listless literature.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
I previously wrote about the flamboyant career of Pastor Billy James Hargis, the head of the proto-Moral Majorityesque group Christian Crusade. Christian Crusade is best known for Hargis' rabid anti-communism and his cultural wars against the 60s counterculture; the group also helped set the stage for the 80s satanic ritual abuse moral panic; Christian Crusade's 64-page booklet by Jess Pedig is a good example of the fundamentalist scare literature from the 70s that led to one of the most irrational cultural trends of the 80s.
Like Hal Lindsey in the mega-bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, Pedigo believes the occult revival in the 60s (at least in younger circles) was evidence that Satan was marshalling his forces for The Final Battle. On the museum's Chick Tract Parody Page, I had noted thatThe Collinsport Historical Society, a blog celebrating the cult TV show Dark Shadows, had a post mentioning that Jack Chick accused the show of being a tool of Satan in the original 1972 version of his tract "Bewitched." Pedigo also had a Pissy-About-TV-Vampires-For-Christ attitude:
Pedigo believes Léo Taxil's late 19th century hokum about The Illuminati and Baphomet and includes images of the supposed Masonic Baphomet used in Taxil's writings in the late 19th century.
Pedigo views psychedelic experimentation and other counterculture practices as portals to satanic control. When I created the infamous "Doorways to Demonic Possession panel for my Chick tract parodies, most of the items listed were from fundamentalist sources. Not surprisingly, Pedigo cites Kurt Koch's The Devil's Alphabet, a work in the museum's collection (I briefly discuss the book here).
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
The Kids [sic] Guide to President Trump is not ostensibly religious literature but I'm sure that future historians and psychiatrists will view the obsession with a psychopathic vulgarian con artist by tens of millions of Americans as a pathological quasi-religious movement. This 20-page booklet is the product of former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate, and drastic weight-loser Mike Huckabee. Not surprisingly, it's a whitewashed hagiography of Trump,
Huckebee was accused of wrongly billing people who received a free sample copy (similar to the recent Trump campaign contribution scandal). When I went to The Kids [sic] Guide website, I noticed that Huckebee was also shilling The Kids [sic] Guide to Joe Biden.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
The museum has copies of several works by megachurch pastor and convicted tax evader W.V. Grant (born 1945), all of which are bizarre. Grant first hit my radar when the late James Randi did an exposé of fundamentalist faith healers in the 1980s (Randi received a well-deserved McArthur Foundation Fellowship as a consequence of his investigation that undoubtedly saved lives). Randi found that Grant employed many of the ploys and tactics used by faith-healing charlatans for decades. I remember seeing Grants' faith (non)-healing histrionics on TV until he got into heat with the federal government for not reporting taxable income relating to one of his McMansions.
"A Mark In The Forehead" is boilerplate end-times porn. It is an undated, 32-page screed that gives hilarious examples of societal immorality that supposedly prove we're in the last generation before The Rapture (when Jebus uses his Holy Hoover to suck up Grant and believers into Heaven, leaving the freethinkers to do some serious doubletakes). Grant blasts nudist magazines, "free love," nude women being used as models in art classes, "ginheads" and anti-Prohibitionists, and homosexuals as being responsible for society's moral downfall. Grant then gives the standard fundy spiel on The Rapture and the Great Tribulation where the un-Raptured must decide whether to take The Mark of the Beast or their ability to buy and sell.
Grant makes some interesting claims:
"Millions of magazines in America teach to our generation sex freedom, free love, and the abolition of the homes and the ten commandments.! It's reported that thousands of tons of papers here have been printed in Moscow and sent over here."
"One church advertised ALL NIGHT SINGING and left the 'g' out, and made it ALL NIGHT SINING. They ran out of tickets and wondered why, until they noticed their mistake."
"The other night a good Christian lady told my wife and me that a physician tried to put her on night life (running with other men). She said he told her that was the only way she would ever be well."
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
The museum has an extensive variety of Life Messengers tracts in its collection, but until the other day, "Who Am I?" remained elusive. We finally have it. As I have mentioned previously, in its heyday in the 1970s until the publishing house petered out in the 80s, Life Messengers served as the main competition for Chick Publications in the distribution of comic booklet evangelical tracts.
"Who Am I?" is a 32-page comic book from 1976 that tells the story of "Dr. I.J. Fronkby," a supposed physicist who, in a public lecture, admitted to being a creationist. A college student interrupts the lecture and the phycicist invites him to talk about it in his hotel room. The haggy student later brings his shaggy college friends to see wide-tie-sporting Dr. Fronkby (remember: it's 1976). He tells them why evolution is implausible; at the end of Dr. Fronkby's lecture, the students tell him they are going to start reading their bibles.At the end, a luminous God tells the reader to surrender his life to Jebus.
I did an Internet search and it appears that Fronkby is fictional. One account indicates that musician Duke Ellington read another Life Messengers publication that mentions Fronkby and how it affected Ellington's spiritual life.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
As I previously noted, Vic Lockman (1927-2017) was probably the most prolific conventional comic book artists of all time (mostly of the funny animal genre) and he still had time to draw religious and reactionary political comics. This 26-page comic booklet from 1968 is similar in plot to a more well-known creationist comic book: Jack Chick's "Big Daddy?"; in both, a wise young creationist shows a credentialed scientist the errors of his evolutionary ways. Little Lori shows Dr. Nozit that creationism is the Way of Christ; the scientist then has a born again experience.
NOTES ON VIC LOCKMAN:This article looks at the role of long-forgotten publisher Ralph Rusthoi on the tract-publishing of Lockman and Jack Chick . . . In the 1970s, Lockman and Walter Lang take on ancient astronaut theorist Erich Von Däniken in the tract "Was God an Astronaut?" . . . Lockman goes into Bircher mode with the tract "Who's Calling The Shots?" . . . The museum featured Lockman's anti-counterculture tract Hippie Come Home. Read it here. . .Lockman's tract, "Have You Been Brainwashed by Ape-Men?" . . . Lockman's work in the context of Jack Chick's mentioned on the Chick Tract Parody Page.
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
For a short time in the early 21st century (2000 to 2003), Chick Publications released 25 specially-numbered tracts known as the Bible Tract Series. They were standard Chick tracts with one small but important physical difference: On the lower right on the front cover, instead of the standard "J.T.C.," these tracts each have a circled number between one and 25. Each of these 25 tracts has a catalyst character, Bob Williams, a buzzkill goody-two-shoes fundy guy with a John Waters mustache. Jack Chick envisioned the tract collection as a tutorial for new Christians who came to Christ at screenings for the Chick Publications film The Light of the World.
With the release of Jack Chick's film The Light of the World in 2003, the Bible Tracts Series along with the Chick tract "You Are About To See . . ." (see pic and video at the end of the article) were given to audiences attending the film. When I went to the world premiere screening of The Light of the World in Orange County in 2003, I was given the promotional Chick tract "You Are About To See . . ."; after the film, I and the other attendees received the shrinkwrapped Bible Tract Series.
That was pretty much the distribution plan: before the movie screening, the attendee is given "You Are About To See . . ." and after the film, the Bible Tract Series. This was the model envisioned and used not only by Chick Publications (who promoted it in "You Are About to See . . ."), but also implemented by the now-defunct Light of the World Project, an ad hoc independent organization set up to assist Chick with spreading the word about the film. The LOTW Project did tract distribution at screenings for a year or so. Using the Wayback Machine at Archive.org, I was able to find a reference to The Light of the World Project's plan for the use of these tracts.
The tracts were intended to be read sequentially, from #1 ("In The Beginning" which deals with the Genesis-based creation story) to #25 (The Revelation-themed "Here He Comes"). In between, the tracts have Know-It-All Bob addressing issues such as Freemasonry, the occult, Roman Catholicism, and Islam using stories from the bible. The tracts were intended to give the reader a rudimentary understanding of Christianity.
A year or so after the release of The Light of the World, Chick Publications dropped the Bible Tract Series. Some of the tracts were re-released as regular Chick tracts printed with the usual "J.T.C." on the cover; other titles were dropped. As of July 2021, only three of the original 25 remain in print as regular Chick tracts (#3 "Sin City," #7 "It's The Law," and #21 "Scream"). Because they were printed for a short time, the numbered tracts are collectible. I wish I had the foresight to keep more of the numbered tracts but the museum has several dozen of them (but, alas, only two copies of the very rare "You Are About to See . . .").
Here is a list of the original volumes of the Bible Tract Series. Re-released versions of "Sin City," "It's The Law," and "Scream" can be read at the in-stock section of Chick Publications' website; the others can be read in the out-of-print/custom order only section ("You Are About to See . . . " is not available at the Chick Publications website but can be viewed as a YouTube video embedded after the end of this article).
1. "In the Beginning"
2. "It's Coming"
3. "Sin City"
4. "The Promise"
5. "The Big Deal"
6. "Framed"
7. "It's The Law"
8. "The Outcast"
9. "The Scam"
10. "The Loser"
11. "The Last Judge"
12. The Nervous Witch"
13. "Caught"
14. "Payback"
15. "Real Heat"
16. "The Monster"
17. "Gladys"
18. "God With Us"
19. "Fallen"
20. "Who Cares?"
21. "Scream"
22. "Good Ol' Boys"
23. "Man In Black"
24. Who's Missing?"
25. "Here He Comes"
Various Light of the World Project Documents
Promo video/DVD from The Light of the World Project below
The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.
For more on the gallery, check out the website here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes. The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts
The index of tracts for the museum's website is here.
Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.
