Narm / Chick Tracts

aka: Jack Chick

Sometimes, tragicomedy strikes like a lightning bolt from heaven.

This section is devoted to the cottage industry that is Chick Tracts Narm. HAW HAW HAW.

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• Dark Dungeons is one of Chick's most infamous tracts — and it's an incredible narm fountain, if only because it espouses the evils of Dungeons & Dragons and showcases Chick's ignorance of a game he's clearly never even seen:
  • The game is never actually called "Dungeons & Dragons" — it's rather unsubtly called "Dark Dungeons". But the characters still refer to it as "D&D" ("Dark & Dungeons"?), which makes it even more obvious what he's really talking about (which is helpful, because the game's not very recognizable otherwise).
  • In Chick's world, when you reach level 8, you receive "the real power" — you learn to cast real spells. There are apparently Moral Guardians out there who really believe this to be true.
  • The wrinkled face Debbie makes to proudly claim that she has managed, thanks to D&D, to perform her first real spell: convince her father to... buy more D&D stuff! Is that the most power the game has to offer?
  • A player's character dies in the game — the other players boot her out forever, and she commits suicide. The illogic of this is compounded by Chick's clear failure to understand how D&D works — you could always try to resurrect your character, or failing that just draw up a new one, but Chick apparently plays for keeps. The protagonist's reaction suggests that maybe she just had issues:
    "You didn't have to do that!"
  • In a similar vein, players seem to be very emotionally invested in their characters' fate:
    "NO, NOT BLACK LEAF! NO, NO! I'M GOING TO DIE!"

    As well as other characters' fates:

    "It's my fault Black Leaf died. I can't face life alone!" (and if she considered herself so much Black Leaf, why did she sign the suicide note as "Marcie"?)
  • A player wants to leave the game, but the other players aren't having it:
    "Don't be stupid, Debbie. I think you'd better let Elfstar take care of things. You're getting out of control."
    "I don't want to be Elfstar anymore. I want to be Debbie."
  • A line you just can't say with a straight face:
    "The intense occult training through D&D prepared Debbie to accept the invitation to enter a witches' coven."
  • In the end, when the characters realize the error of their ways, what do they do with their leftover rulebooks, gameboards, dice, and other accessories? Do they throw them all away? Return them to the publisher? Sell them off to a gaming store? No, that would make them normal people. Instead, they do the good Christian thing and chuck them in a big fat bonfire. Granted, it does make sense that they wouldn't want anyone else to get their hands on materials that they consider sinful, but it seems fairly extreme.
  • Dark Dungeons is so infamous, it was adapted into a live-action movie in 2014. A Kickstarter campaign helped make it happen. The sight of real actors reading the lines in costume and in character has to be seen to be believed. In this case, the Narm is intentional, as the director is an avowed fan of Stephen Colbert and has this to say about his work:
    "The best humor is done by a person doing it completely straight that for a moment you think he's serious."
• The Gay Blade:
  • The opening line is almost poetic — once you get past the implication homosexuals have gay sex on purpose to spite Biblical teachings:
    "From Satan's shadowy world of homosexuality, in a display of defiance against society, they come forth - those who suffer the agony of rejection, the despair of unsatisfied longing - desiring, etc."
  • The mom covering her son's eyes upon spotting hippie-looking gays in what sadly looks like literal homophobia.
  • Over the course of the tract, Jack refers to gays as "homosexuals" so much, he makes the word itself look like a slur.
  • A lesbian finds God and leaves her partner — or more accurately, runs out of her house, leading to this exchange:
    Lesbian: Come back!
    Former Lesbian: NO!
  • A common viewpoint expressed in uncommonly hamtastic fashion:
    "You're offended by gays?! Are you some kind of BIGOT?!!!"
• Doom Town has a gem in the very first panel:
  "12% of the little boys and girls growing up are going to be lesbians and homosexuals^* Note the conspicuous absence of bisexuals from this list... And they are NOT going to be called faggots, dykes, queers and sissies. WE ARE GOING TO SAVE OUR CHILDREN."
• Who Murdered Clarice? is about the fate of an abortion doctor:
  • Who names an unborn embryo that was going to be aborted Clarice?
  • The doctor apparently had a side business which endears him even less to the public:
    "You devil! ... You sold her baby ears for $75 and I damn you to Hell!"
  • The doctor is judged after death by:
    "Surprise, everybody!!! It's the Lord Jesus Christ."
• The Last Generation is set 20 Minutes into the Future and is Jack Chick's vision of everything that will happen if the people he hates have their way:
  • The kid Bobby does everything over the top, from his Hitler Youth-style uniform to his suggestion that cats and dogs would make great sacrifices.^note The latter is actually a retcon of the original version of the tract, which "updated" the Bad Future from being caused by science and atheism to being caused by the occult. The original used cats and dogs as examples of "extinct animals".
  • Bobby's Christian family's moral values are called into question when they repeatedly refer to him as "the Monster":
    Daughter: Dad, shh, the monster is coming!
  • Apparently famous New Age healers look like villains from a Fifties B-Movie. They're also cannibals:
    "Take this heretic away. Dispose of it, or use it for food."
• In Room 310, one brother impersonates the other and gets executed for murder, and the surviving brother confesses later — only to avoid punishment because someone already paid for the crime. This shift from justice to bloodlust manages to cross the line to hilarity.
• Angels? is about how rock music is evil and every successful rock band secretly sold out to Satan:
  • The very first panel displays a huge Broken Aesop, because the band is pissed at getting ripped off... by a pastor. The lesson here is that if you accept Chick's specific brand of Christianity, you can get away with basically anything.
  • The band's corrupt boss is named "Lew Siffer". You'd think that rock musicians would spot that allusion a mile away.
  • The band's song titles are hilarious, ranging from "Embrace Me, Love of Death" (more reminiscent of poorly translated Richard Wagner) and "We're Going to Rock, Rock, Rock Rock with the ROCK!" Why No Revival? similarly has "Rock for the Rock" (reminiscent of Spinal Tap's "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight") and "Rock of Ages" (which Chick probably didn't realize is the name of a real song by Def Leppard, or the name of a rock opera later loosely adapted to a film).
  • "Lew Siffer" presents a chart explaining how he masterminded the evolution of rock music, classifying Elvis Presley and The Beatles as Hard Rock (when they're really really not). By Chick's logic, every rock band on Earth — even the Beatles and their Silly Love Songs, even the Christian bands — are writing demonic heavy metal bent on sending souls to hell. If there's no such thing as The Moral Substitute, Chick has a lot to answer to, considering comic books were The New Rock & Roll once upon a time.
  • The world's worst wedding present:
    "Then I'll give you a wedding present... some AIDS."
  • The fate of the band:
    "Bobby died of AIDS. Jim OD'd. And Don is into vampirism."
  • The Devil reveals himself with a ZAP:
    "TOM, NO!"
  • Near the end, Tom picks up a Chick Tract to "see what it says", reads it, and exclaims "O God, I've been a fool. Please save me!" But since the panel doesn't change, it looks a lot more like he's reading the tract's content aloud, with according skepticism.
  • Bobby's very clearly marrying another man when Lew decides to give him AIDS. It makes it look like Chick is saying even the Devil is against same-sex marriage.
• Boo! is practically impossible to take seriously:
  • An otherwise normal Halloween party randomly involves sacrificing a cat to the Devil. You'll notice these inexplicable sacrifices quite a bit in Jack Chick's universe.
  • Someone goes on a chainsaw rampage, while wearing a jack-o-lantern with a goofy grin on his head. When the pumpkin falls off, the killer is revealed to be Satan. A cop responds thus:
    "Run... 'Tis the Devil himself!"
  • A teenager finds an easy way to get rid of Satan: yell at him and hurt his feelings.
    "I hate you! And your lousy birthday!"
• Chick's anti-Catholic screeds that pepper his works are simultaneously sad and hilarious. To hear him tell it, an Ancient Conspiracy issuing from the Vatican has been responsible for:
  • Both World Wars
  • The Holocaust (notwithstanding its Catholic victims)
  • The assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (notwithstanding Kennedy being the first Catholic president)
  • The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II (apparently a False Flag Operation)
  • The Ku Klux Klan (which hates Catholics)
  • Islam (which doesn't oppose the Bible so much as consider it incomplete)
  • Communism (which is anti-religion in general);
  • Mormonism (which believes that the Catholic Church was responsible for corrupting true Christianity);
  • Jehovah's Witnesses (so then every group that practices Christianity differently from Chick?)
• Oh, and on the topic of the darned Papists — My Name ... In the Vatican?. Chick apparently believes that the Roman Inquisition currently has the name of every Protestant church member stored on a big computer in the Vatican. Yes, one big computer in Rome stores the name of every Bible-believing Protestant Christian for ... unknown reasons. If you want proof of Rome's influence today, just look at how many Christian bookstores refuse to publish this story!
• In The Little Bride, two Christian children are almost tricked into reciting the shahada, the Muslim creed, which Chick believes would automatically convert them to Islam^note It wouldn't by Muslim teaching, because you have to actually know and believe what you're saying. They realize how close they came:
  "My goodness, Susy, we almost became Muslims! I want Jesus!'"
• Moving On Up! goes into the evils of evolution, which Chick clearly doesn't understand (and also equates with Nazism).
  • Resident evolutionist Tyler is not convinced that God is looking out for us:
    Cathy: Adam and Eve really blew it by disobeying God. And their sin was passed on to us!
    Tyler: What a bummer!
  • Tyler sides with his teachers (emphasis in the original):
    Tyler: Now I see why Jesus is banned in our school and why we hate him and his cruel Ten Commandments! Only weak, inferior people like you believe that nonsense!
  • The demon who's been whispering in Tyler's ear forgets which side he's on for a minute:
    "God bless our schools for teaching them this!"
  • Tyler seems to have gotten part of his information about evolution from Devo:
    "We lost our tails!"
  • Tyler's mother explains morality:
    Tyler's Mother: It's up to you, Tyler. Evolution does away with morals!
    Tyler: Wow, anything goes! I can lie, cheat...what's to keep me from becoming a god?
  • Chick talks to himself:
    Tyler: There are no absolutes.
    Chick's asterisk: Lie! Here's an absolute: the words of God (KJV) !
  • Tyler goes a little too far:
    "You're dangerous! They don't teach that in school. We came from monkeys, you sicko!
  • Tyler meets his end:
    "Then it happened. Tyler finally croaked."
    The Grim Reaper: Hi there.
    Tyler: (plop)
  • And Chick tells us this:
    "You'll be in the lake of fire with billions of others who believe we evolved from monkeys."
• I FEEL SOOOOOO CLEAN!◊
• "YAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!" — screamed by victims of a poison gas attack. This probably violates the laws of biology.
• Doesn't this information upset you?:
  • A calm discussion about ancient Egypt (or Chick's understanding of it):
    "Doesn't this information upset you?"
    "It should, beloved!"
  • Chick's references to the "Egyptian Sun God, Osiris" and the "Babylonian Sun God, Baal".
  • Emphasis Chick's (and it comes out of nowhere):
    "NOW, ISN'T THAT JUST A LITTLE PRESUMPTUOUS?"
• From Something In Common?:
  • Buddhism teaches that all people are reflections of a single greater being, and that individuality is only an illusion. Here's how Chick understands it:
    "I'm a Buddhist and you don't exist!"
  • Some of the people coming out of the ark, who very suspiciously resemble Osama bin Laden, Queen Elizabeth II, Mao Zedong, and Ayatollah Khomeini.
  • Chick's understanding of non-Christian morality:
    "There's nothing wrong with adultery or lying!"
  • A strange description of Christianity:
    "But the papa wasn't human... God was the daddy..."
  • Turns out the Forbidden Fruit wasn't an apple, but rather some sort of speckled pickle. (That's actually Biblically accurate — the Bible never specifies the fruit.)
  • An underwhelming order:
    "Grrr, kill him."'
  • Someone realizes what happens if he doesn't accept Christianty:
    "Will sinners go to heaven? NO! That's bad news! So where do all the sinners go when they die? We're all going to hell. That's NOT cool!"
• From Unloved:
  • Everything's piling on this one guy. Keep in mind that the cancer part wasn't even mentioned until this panel, or maybe he's just exaggerating here.
    "I'm UNWANTED, UNLOVED, DISOWNED... and the doctor says I'm dying of CANCER!"
  • So he's about to jump. A man comes up to him and starts telling him about Jesus. He's not impressed at first:
    "This better be good, or I'm going to jump!"
• Any panel where a silhouetted angel casually tosses someone into the Lake of Fire.
• In the Beginning:
  • The lizard (supposedly Satan in serpent form) looks nothing like an actual serpent.
  • The evangelist looks just like David "Are you serious" Silverman (an atheist, for what it's worth).
• Asking Jesus for advice:
  "What should I do, Jesus?!"
  "Bang on the door!"
  "Okay!"
• His "native" tract is particularly fun:
  • God is a gleaming Eldritch Abomination who eternally damns His children. (Scarily, the first part is one of the few parts of The Bible Chick gets right.)
  • Being against having uranium tailings in your water is a sin! Being a teetotaller is also a sin!
  • Naturally, if you don't have long hair, then you have a mohawk.
• In Flight 144, Chick introduces a typically jolly, respectable-looking Christian evangelist missionary couple who have been running a charity in Africa their whole careers. But their plane crashes, and they get sent to hell for not proselytizing and using their charity to draw people into their church.
• The picture linked to under Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking from the main page, especially the snarling Sikh who's going to stab you with his giant kirpan.
• "You're going to meet the death angel."
• Apparently, even mentioning the word "Hell" is no longer acceptable in household conversation, according to "Going Down?"
• "Oh man, this is awesome! He's killing his own brother!" The original version has "Hey man, this is outta sight!", which is arguably funnier.
• At chick.com, there are randomised "Tract Myths" and other adlike things at the bottom of each tract page.
  • Tract Myth #3◊, which is about shyness, features a young girl hiding her face. If you scroll down and see it after finishing a tract, it looks like she's reacting to the tract you just read with a Face Palm.
  • Tract Myth #16◊ features a man making a ridiculously cartoonish angry face, with the caption "Ever fear you'll get this if you witness? Try Chick Tracts... people love 'em!" Yeah, they'll be too busy laughing.
  • One ad has people fighting over a Chick Tract. Given that they're most often found abandoned in public places, this is unlikely to have occurred in real life.
• In the comic about guardian angels, the angel leaves after one masturbation too many, only to return to save the guy from a random Satanist stabbing.
• The kid hero of The Little Sneak gets tragically killed by lightning◊. The fact that the artwork is otherwise fairly realistic (far better than the typical Chick tract) makes the cartoonish touch of the shoes flying off even more jarring.
• Here, Kitty Kitty:
  • This panel appears to depict God casually tossing Jesus down to Earth from a cloud.
  • This line might be intentional Narm, but it doesn't quite work:
    "Don't do witchcraft... do your homework!"
• Crazy Wolf is all about how Native Americans worship Satan, and it's batshit insane through and through, but the moment when the Indian guy tells Old Mary that he's going to convert to Christianity is particularly funny.
  "And he did! And Satan went NUTS!"
• Surprisingly, Payback manages to do this to Queen Jezebel's Family-Unfriendly Death, particularly when you see a dog burping after finishing eating her corpse, and the preacher/narrator's description of it:
  "When the dogs were finished with Jezebel, not much was left. It was pretty gross."
• The face (despite its realistic style) and the caption on the second panel of page 12 of the tract "Killer Storm":
  "It's raining! Gasp!! Noah was right after all!"
• Goliath's face in The Terminator looks straight out of Planet of the Apes.
• The Missing Day demonstrates Chick's consistent misunderstanding of sound effects with its DROOL and GULP Unsound Effects.
• In Sin City:
  • A gay reverend is preaching to a man in the hospital about how God loves everyone, including homosexuals.^note Despite what Chick thinks, the reverend has a point: there's a strong argument that the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn homosexuality, but just gay sex (or perhaps just gay gang-rape), and God loves everybody regardless of their sin. A man in the hall overhears this and bursts through the door to stop him. He compounds the Narm by screaming:
    "I'm going to pray right now!"
  • The reverend is successfully shamed into regretting his teaching, but he's saved at the end of the tract — by learning that Jesus rose from the dead and went to Heaven. This is the core story of Christianity — how does a reverend not know this?
• One tract, dramatically and seriously called Somebody Goofed, has an androgynous kid who's never heard of Jesus before being talked out of accepting Christ by a man in a turtleneck who makes references to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. This man beats up an elderly preacher, causing the kid to say, "You didn't have to do that! He wasn't doing anything to you!" Literally three panels later, both Christians are saying they'll listen to this perfect stranger "from now on". The stranger encourages him to drive across railroad tracks while there's a train coming. (That's how they get you, apparently.) Then the two of them wake up in Hell, and the turtlenecked guy removes his mask; He's Satan! Just about the silliest-looking Satan you've ever seen.
• The "heroine's" reaction to the Mormon missionaries in The Visitors — "They're Mormons!"
• The seventh panel of Where's Your Name? depicts God in the act of hoisting Lucifer over his head and literally throwing him out of heaven. Motion lines have also helpfully been drawn to show Lucifer flailing helplessly in God's grasp.
• Most of Big Daddy?, which features not only Chick's flimsy attempts at proving creationism "scientifically", but also his depiction of an ordinary biology teacher hanging a portrait of a chimpanzee eating banana labeled "Our Father" in his classroom, and who turns into a frothing madman when one of his students disagrees with his stance on evolution.
  • The Christian student maintains his composure and his eyes squinted as he speaks ("creationism is a fact and I am 100% sure of what I say"), in contrast to the teacher's outbursts of anger and his apparent hyperhidrosis ("evolutionism is a hoax and I am unable to prove otherwise").
  • The tract dismisses the existence of gluons, only to then suggest, with a straight face, that Jesus holds all atoms together. Even for the Son of God, literally holding the fabric of the universe together seems a bit above his pay grade.
• In First Bite, among the members of the evil vampire coven, one can see several "vampires" who aren't vampires, including Blade (a half-breed vampire hunter), Gandalf, Professor McGonagall, and, incredibly, Osama bin Laden. It's such a blatant and poorly executed Take That!, it can't be anything but Narm.
• The title character of The Bull has some great lines:
  "You little creep...why didn't you tell me I was going to hell?"

  or:

  "There will be no more raping, because I just found out that God hates sodomy!"
• God giving a thumbs-up at the end of ''And It Was Good".
• In The Unwelcome Guest
  • Larry defends Freemasonry:
    "GRRR! Masonry is the best thing that's happened in my life, you @!!!**!"
  • Frank, who recruits Larry to the Masons, looks a lot like Stephen Sondheim for whatever reason.
• In No Fear?:
  • Chick's portrayal of Lance's suicide and subsequent condemnation to Hell, in his mind, is an anvil that needed to be dropped. But he handles it so poorly, it's impossible to take seriously: Lance gets surrounded by goofy cartoon demons and shouts incredibly narmy dialogue:
    "AAAHHH...My leg's on fire! Somebody HELP! I can't stand it! I'm burning!"
  • Dolly (an improbable name for a Goth girl) and the preacher have some hilarious clunky lines later in the tract:
    Preacher: You were seconds from the flames of HELL!
    Dolly: Then I've been LIED TO! We were told that hell was one big party... and all our friends would be there.
    Preacher: Dolly, millions of people have believed that same tragic lie.
• The big moment in The Poor Little Witch when Mandy summons a powerful demon.

  Mandy: Oh Bruth, you are my friend. Help me in P.E. today! Make Cathy drop the ball!...I command you!
  Bruth (who looks like some kind of monkey with goat horns): Gotcha, baby!

• In Devil's Night, Susy doesn't want to dress up for her class's Halloween party, but her grandfather tells her that her teacher is an authority figure, and she must obey her. He then offers a loophole by dressing as Santa Claus, who represents the commercialization of the holiday.
• "Still No Revival?" depicts the alleged depravity of modern television by showing a family watching Family Guy (with surprisingly accurate renderings of Peter and Stewie on the TV screen), with Mom saying "I just love little Stewie!" and her son pointing out "He's gay!*". The asterisk is a footnote for "Lev. 18:22", making it look like Chick is saying that Leviticus actually discusses Stewie's sexual orientation.^note Oddly, the 2009 Family Guy episode "Family Gay", which debuted two years before this tract, has Stewie cite that same exact verse to condemn homosexuality, which might make the Chick panel an odd Shout-Out/Take That!

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