William lulzblogs Chick Tracts because he hates himself

Thanks to Sneeb for the links to these tracts.

FIRST TRACT!

First panel: It looks like there are two guys at "Camp Basil Bub." Looks like they rented the entire place really cheaply for a Halloween party.

And it looks like everybody who's anybody(i.e. heathens) from Salem High will be there. And Charlie got this place so cheap because 13 people were murdered there. Seriously, Jack? Salem? Thirteen? This symbolism is more anvilicious than that book in the middle of 1984.

And they riddled the killer with bullets, but they Never Found the Body. Doesn't matter, though, because No One Could Survive That!. Jack Chick does not use tropes subtly, I'll give him that.

And Carrie will sacrifice the cat(which I'm sure is black, because Jack Chick's ideas are blatantly obvious) at midnight''.

I'm going to guess at this point that the ghost of the murderer is going to come and murder them all, and they'll be in hell because they celebrated Halloween and weren't good Christians.

...Holy shit. It's The Great Pumpkin. I'm going to post this segment of the liveblog because I need to pause. Why? THE MOTHERFUCKING GREAT PUMPKIN.

 ^*

edited 11th Sep '09 9:28:25 PM by WilliamWideWeb

"THE MOTHERFUCKING GREAT PUMPKIN"

You, sir, win :p

That tract is hilarious. A Wiccan friend of mine once read that, then edited it to become a tract calling for conversion to the Great Horned God Herne, and expressing all the fearmongering imagery as idiocy.

I hurt for you, William. You're such a masochist ._.

Okay, now that I'm coherent again. Halloween is apparently the Great Pumpkin's birthday, and he forgot his chainsaw. I think we'll be seeing him some more very soon, perhaps with a chainsaw? Not sure though.

Very next panel: "O mighty Satan, we sacrifice this cat to you, on your birthday." Because otherwise we wouldn't be able to tell it's a cat. And actually, the cat looks like it has stripes. I am incredibly surprised.

...AND IN CRASHES THE GREAT PUMPKIN, WIELDING A WEAPON. And can you guess what weapon it is? If you guessed laser pistol, you would be wrong. It's a chainsaw. And, of course, Satan The Great Pumpkin doesn't just want a cat. He's going to come and slaughter Carrie! Okay, I've decided to revise my final prediction: at least one of them might survive to tell the world why you shouldn't celebrate Halloween.

And in the very next panel, instead of showing The Great Pumpkin killing everybody, it shows everybody screaming and one guy running out of the house yelling "He's killing EVERYBODY!". Really, Jack, it doesn't show confidence in your art's ability to show when you have to tell like that.

Next panel, we cut to two fat policemen(you can tell they're evil, because they're fat) yet again telling us what we already know. I remember Signature Style, after telling us that Frank Miller likes whores, that he repeats himself. I think Jack Chick repeats himself more.

And 40 minutes later, they presumably get an army, and despite the fact that it's the same killer as last time, they do exactly what they did last time.

The Great Pumpkin pulls off his head mask to reveal himself as Satan. But because the stereotypical image isn't enough, we have a fat policeman telling us that this guy with pointed ears, a pointed nose, horns, and a goatee is in fact the devil, and not, say, Coach Mike Krzyzewski...wait, Coach Mike Krzyzewski is Satan. Bad example.

Two panels of boring exposition. Not much to snark at, except maybe the weird shape of fat policeman's head.

And now we're at a church. So now, instead of one-dimensional, strawmannish villains, we get to see one-dimensional, strawmannish heroes. And Satan reminds us that he is evil by hating on the supposed hero as uncool. He spawns inside the church in order to scare the square who's praying when it's party time, but runs away screaming when he realizes that this child knows Satan's true weakness: PLASMA CANNONS! yelling at him!

The next morning, our Anviliciously Good Christian Child, who apparently has a name, asks his child-molesting pastor if Halloween is really Satan's birthday. His answer is "Of course not, my son. It was a Celtic harvest festival repurposed by the Catholic Church as All Saints' Day in order to more easily convert the Irish." No, wait, that's what he'd say if he were knowledgeable, and this is Jack Chick.

He starts telling the story of Lucifer, which, by the way, never actually appears in The Bible(I think this story comes from Paradise Lost, but I could be wrong) about fallen angels and such. It's mostly exposition, among the ridiculously boring art of Jack Chick.

And now we enter the most anvilicious part of the work, which is a real feat, when you consider that this is Jack Chick. The pastor tells us how Satan has corrupted everybody who isn't part of our tiny little church, and how Halloween is part of Satan's evil deception. And as we get closer to the Second Coming, evil Satanists that practice human sacrifice will become more popular. Fun fact: in the early 90s, there were reports of a Satanism epidemic, mostly culled from repressed memories "recovered"(read: created) by hypnosis. Of course, nobody ever actually found anybody killed by Satanists. It's kind of hard to kill someone without somebody noticing, especially at the scale these Satanists were said to kill people.

And now we get to the history of Halloween. The picture here is of a druid, who has a staff that looks like an ankh. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the ankh was Egyptian. But anyways, Halloween was originally named "Samhain"(one thing he does get right, surprisingly, but only the name), and victims were stolen for human sacrifice, because they aren't Christian, and non-Christians can only do evil. And in exchange for the victim, they gave a Jack-o-Lantern, which wasn't actually associated with Halloween until the 20th century.

And here we learn about how Halloween is actually an attempt to turn kids from Christianity into witchcraft, and how Satan is attempting to block the message of Jesus's crucifiction. He clearly isn't doing very well, because I hear a lot more people telling me about Jesus than I do telling me about witchcraft.

And here we have even more blatant preaching than the last few panels. Here, little bars on the top and bottom tell us to accept Jesus Christ as our savior blah blah blah.

And there we have it, the evils of Halloween.

O William, how I have lol'ed.

If that's his interpretation of Halloween, I'd like to see him do Christmas and Easter. Which also are pagan-based, amirite?

edited 11th Sep '09 10:31:05 PM by melloncollie

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD. SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE.

Don't forget the little questionnaire at the end with checkboxes asking you to renounce Satan and become one with Christ or something to that effect. He sticks those at the end of every tract.

And just so you know, I'm going to do more of these. Jack Chick is so horrifyingly bad I don't think I can stop.

I've created helped create a monster.

edited 11th Sep '09 10:43:14 PM by melloncollie

How the hell do I categorize this? Stick it Comics?, Or someplace else? And really, the Great Pumpkin? WTF?

EDIT: A better question might be, do I count Chick Tracts collectively, or individually?

edited 11th Sep '09 11:02:43 PM by colin

1. Stick it in comics.
2. It's actually Satan, but it's an anthropomorphic pumpkin appearing on Halloween, and I immediately thought of the Great Pumpkin.
3. Count them collectively, because I'm going to do all of the Chick Tracts I lulzblog in this thread.

edited 12th Sep '09 9:31:36 AM by WilliamWideWeb

I tried to read through his little comic.

Currently, I'm trying to stuff it into the back of my skull and lock it into a tiny little thought box so I cannot cause any further damage to my already withering sanity.

Good luck, WWW.

Miijhal: This is why you don't read a Chick Tract unless you hate yourself like I do.

Oh, I hate myself. I'm not, however, a masochist. :P

Well, today, I'm going to read a few chapters of Dracula for English class, and then lulzblog another Chick Tract.

Well, that was... wow. I just- I can't- what is this I don't even

Welcome back to the demonstration of my masochism. This time, I'm going to be lulzblogging Somebody Goofed. Thanks again to Sneeb for linking these in melloncollie's lulzblogging thread. (Read that one, too.)

And now. First panel. The art is so bad that I wouldn't be sure what was happening were it not for the text. Somebody named Bobby just overdosed on speed. Apparently he was trying to commit suicide? There's some guy with a pentagram on his shirt and it looks like he's smoking something.

And now at the second panel, we have a bunch of people reacting to his death. I know this because somebody is saying "That's Bobby—He's dead! How awful!" I still don't know where the fuck this is, because of how bad the art is. And there's some guy with a skull on his shirt who is smoking and I think it's the guy from the first panel, and he has this expression on his face that makes it look like he doesn't give a shit. I'm going to just pretend that it's a Stealth Parody and this dude is secretly our hero.

And now, we get to the Anvilicious part, because it just wouldn't be Jack Chick if it weren't anvilicious. Some bald dude with glasses is telling a young child that he wants to molest about God and hell and stuff. Some guy to the right is facepalming and I think he's laughing at the fanatic. It looks like this guy is supposed to be the villain, but he's telling the truth here. Also: I still don't know where the fuck this is supposed to be. There's ambulance doors but there's also the wall of a building or something.

And now the three characters are tanding in front of a vague shaded background, and the child-molesting priest is telling the kid, who looks like he's on drugs, about how if you don't accept Jesus Christ, you are eternally lost, and have to live in New Jersey for the rest of your life. Mister Facepalm here is laughing and making a "joke", and our stoned teenager has apparently never heard about Christianity.

Honestly, this might be the most ridiculous thing about Jack Chick. There is pretty much no way you could spend your entire life living in the United States without hearing about Christianity. This is the main reason I'm reasonably certain that Jack Chick has never seen the real world outside his incredibly small church circle.

And so the bald guy whom I want to punch is talking about how all have sinned and come short of God. Mr. Facepalm somehow stops him short here and starts talking about how a loving God would never condemn so many people to eternal hell. Mr. Facepalm is obnoxious and unlikable, but he's still much less obnoxious and unlikable than Mr. Combover. Though it's a lot harder for Mr. Combover, who is condemned to being the "hero" of a Jack Chick work and thus is contractually banned from saying anything that makes sense.

And so Mr. Combover continues his practice of spouting off Bible quotes that seem to have no relation to his or Mr. Facepalm's arguments by quoting John 3:16, favorite of obnoxious Christians everywhere. Mr. Facepalm then tells Mr. Combover about how people who have actually read the Bible admit that it's full of contradictions. Mr.Combover finally says something that isn't just an out-of-context Bible quote, and it's that the Bible is God's inspired word, and those who claim it to be filled with contradictions do not understand it. For example, "If a man sleeps with another man, kill him" does not contradict with "thou shalt not kill" because homosexuals aren't people!

And so our stoned teenager asks Mr. Combover how to go to heaven, because he was born and raised inside a cave, and Mr. Combover returns to his Bible Quote mode. And then, Mr.Facepalm comes in to talk about how Christianity is outdated and based on fear, and how it's a menace to society. I don't think I've ever heard anybody actually say that Christians should be locked up. In fact, we still pretty much haven't had a non-Christian elected to the fucking Presidency, but that's a different story. And we finally get to see the background. There's some sort of signpost, and some cars, and a mailbox. It's all very shittily drawn. Mr. Facepalm also has the weirdest facial expressions ever.

And now, in one of the most ridiculous Shameless Self-Promoter events ever, Mr. Combover gives a Chick Tract to the stoned teenager.

And now, Mr. Facepalm elbows Mr. Combover in the back, because while the Bible quotes were obnoxious, giving the child a Chick Tract is just dangerous. The stoned teenager, because he hasn't heard of Christianity, much less Chick Tracts, is understandably confused. And I think I'm going to stop here, because too much Jack Chick at one time is bad for one's mind.

Nooooo! Bobby died!

At least he died doing what he loved...drugs.

But Bobby was such a nice kid, I would never had known he was into that stuff...

Did you get to the part yet where they crash into the train?

I do these liveblogs as I read them. I stopped right there. I'll probably finish lulzblogging sometime tonight.

And Bobby G has actually talked about doing drugs in one of the other threads. If I remember correctly, he didn't actually like them that much. (Or, at least, he didn't like mushrooms.) What I find weird about this tract so far is that despite the fact that the guy died of a drug overdose, there was a random stoner in a Satanic t-shirt, and our stoned teenager was actually smoking in one of those panels, we haven't talked about drugs at all in this tract yet.

Hmmph. Anyway, I love how Mr. Facepalm brings up all these sensible arguments about the Bible and Mr. Combover doesn't even try to counter them.

@WWW: I just want to say that not even Satan would force someone to live in New Jersey.

That's why some people think that he's a deep-cover anti-Christian, melloncollie. Alternatively, he's incredibly stupid.

Holy-! Thank you so much for doing this! Chick is unintentionally funny, it's a shame he gives my religion a bad name.