A HISTORY OF JACK
Jack Thomas Chick was born in 1924. He was a sickly child, whose ears were lanced by the doctors a dozen times before he was a year old. In an open letter to his followers in 2000, Chick suggested this early ill health was the result of his mother’s attempt to abort him. (For his views on this topic see the tract Who Murdered Clarice? where he describes abortion in America as “the new holocaust!”). However, the Almighty had bigger plans, and Jack survived the perils of the womb. He was born into an opportune decade, coming of age in the 1940s, when the golden age of comic books was in full swing. Detective strips and superhero serials were everywhere; as were the infamous Tijuana Bibles: full-on pornographic parodies of Mickey Mouse, Dick Tracey and Popeye. Whether Chick read these shocking little strips is anybody’s guess, but the Tijuana Bible format (palm-sized eight-pagers) are certainly the closest match to what 1 would become the Chick Tract format.
According to You Don’t Know Jack, the official biography by David Daniels, the world tried to corrupt Chick from an early age. For example, Catholic members of his extended family forced him to blaspheme in exchange for food, and they pressured him into seeing a fortune-teller. Such events clearly affected his view of Catholics, but at school he kept himself out of major trouble with a love of sketching and a passion for drama. In 1942 he beat 50 other candidates to win a two-year paid scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theatre. Bigger drama was to come: in 1943, during his second semester, World War II whisked him off to serve in New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines and Japan, although as a cryptographer he never once saw a gun being fired.
Chick was not yet a Christian while serving in the Army, but he did show distaste for ‘sinful ways’. When stationed in Japan, for example, he declined an invite to a red-light district. He pretended he was married and said that he’d rather stay faithful. He didn’t have to wait long. He met his real-life wife back at the Playhouse after the war. She was called Lola Lynn, though he sometimes called her his ‘Honey Girl’. In 1948, he and Lola visited her fundamentalist parents in Canada on their honeymoon and his new in-laws insisted he listen to the Charles E Fuller Old-Fashioned Revival Hour on the radio. Chick said it was the first time he had really heard the “precious message of the Gospel” and his faith blossomed over the next decade. In the 1950s he was working in the aerospace industry as a technical illustrator, and even did some syndicated comic strips in newspapers, but it didn’t take long for his artistic skills to fuse with his faith.
By the 1960s Chick had already started writing tracts – he and his wife Lola turned his kitchen into a production space. Yet what became the true calling of his life was kick-started when he met missionary and radio broadcaster Bob Hammond. Bob said that the Communists had been taking control of China through a series of small, illustrated books. Chick’s vision was galvanised. Perhaps God might use his own little books to start a Christian counterrevolution that might challenge not only Communism but every other evil ‘ism’ that threatened to ruin the world. And for Chick, almost every ‘ism’ was evil.
The following decades saw his tract output grow and grow, particularly in 1972, when he hired the talented artist Fred Carter to help keep up with demand. As the company developed, so did the controversy around Chick’s shocking worldview...
1 It’s certainly reasonable to think Chick caught the infamous EC horror comics of the 1940s and 1950s, as his style and themes so clearly resemble them, (even down to the ‘Haw Haw’ laughter of his characters). Censorship pressures led to the EC horror comic line becoming defunct in 1956 (see FT320:28-35). In some ways, Jack Chick resurrected their approach, albeit with very different motivations.