Jack Chick

Biography

Chick was born in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, California, and later moved with his family to Alhambra, where Chick was active in the high school drama club. According to Chick, he was not religious in high school. After graduation, he continued his drama education at the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater on a two-year scholarship.

In February 1943, Chick was drafted as a private into the U.S. Army. He served for three years in the Pacific theater of World War II, serving in New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, and Japan. Chick credited his time overseas for inspiring him to translate his tracts into many different languages and said that he had "a special burden for missions and missionaries."

After the war, he returned to the Pasadena Playhouse and met his wife while working on a production there. Lola Lynn Priddle (1926–1998), a Canadian immigrant, came from a very religious family, and Chick called her "instrumental in his salvation". Priddle and her parents introduced Chick to the Charles E. Fuller radio show, the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, and Chick said that he was converted while listening to an episode of this show. Chick and Priddle married in 1948 and had one child, Carol, who died in 2001. In February 1998, Priddle died, and Chick married an Asian woman, whose name has been variously reported as Susie and Susy.

In a 2005 issue of his company's newsletter, Battle Cry, Chick reported that he had a life-threatening health emergency sometime between 2003 and 2005 and said, "My flu turned into pneumonia, my blood sugar dropped to 20 (I am diabetic)... I was going into a coma. My wife called 911 and while they were on the way, I had a heart attack. A day or so later I had to undergo a triple bypass."

Chick had limited personal contact with the public; he gave only one known professional interview after 1975. The lack of available public information about him created some speculation that he was a pen name for unnamed authors. He died on October 23, 2016 at the age of 92.

Career

From 1953 to 1955, Chick drew a single-panel cartoon, whose text was written by P. S. Clayton, titled "Times Have Changed?", which thematically resembled the B.C. comic strip and The Flintstones animated cartoon but predated both. These were syndicated by the Mirror Enterprises Co. in Los Angeles area newspapers.

After converting to Christianity, Chick wanted to evangelize others, but he was too shy to talk to people directly about religion. Chick heard from missionary Bob Hammond, who had broadcast in Asia on the Voice of America, that the Communist Party of China had gained significant influence among ordinary Chinese in the 1950s through the distribution of small comic books. Chick also began working with a prison ministry and created a flip chart of illustrations to use with his presentation. He hit upon the idea of creating witnessing tracts, which could be given to people directly or indirectly.

While working for the AstroScience Corporation (a maker of tape recorders and avionics for the U.S. government) in El Monte, California, he self-published his first tract, Why No Revival?, with a loan from his credit union in 1960. He published his second tract, A Demon's Nightmare, in 1962. He decided to create more tracts and began "using his kitchen table as an office and art studio". Christian bookstores were reluctant to accept the tracts, but they were popular among missionaries and churches.

Chick Publications was officially established in 1970 in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Initially, Chick wrote and illustrated all of the comics himself, but in 1972 he hired another artist to illustrate many of the tracts. Fred Carter illustrated tracts anonymously until 1980, when he was identified in an issue of Chick's newsletter Battle Cry. Carter also painted the oil paintings seen in The Light of the World, a film Chick produced that related the Christian gospel.

Chick Publications

Chick Publications is known to have released over twenty-three full-color "Chick comics" since its founding. They are full-size comic books, and most were first published between 1974 and 1985. The first eleven form the Crusader comics series, which follows the stories of two fundamentalist Christians and addresses topics such as the occult, Bible prophecy, and the theory of evolution.

Chick Publications also distributes "Chick tracts", small comic tracts with religious messages. Most of these can be viewed in their entirety on the company's website. The most popular Chick tract was "This Was Your Life!". It has been translated into around 100 languages, and many other tracts are available in widely spoken languages such as Arabic, German, Spanish, and Tagalog. Several of Chick's tracts have been translated into more obscure languages as Blue Hmong, Huichol, Ngiemboon, Tshiluba, and the constructed language of Esperanto.

Wiccan author Kerr Cuhulain has described Chick and his theories as being "anti-feminist" and "anti-Pagan", noted that a Chick Publications comic book was the source of a Rapid City, South Dakota police detective's presentation on the history of Satanism given in 1989, and describes him as "easily the least reputable source of reliable information on religious groups".

Catholic Answers has called Chick "savagely anti-Catholic", describes Chick's statements about the Catholic Church as "bizarre" and "often grotesque in their arguments", and calls for the tracts to be pulled from the market and corrected. In the early 1980s, Chick's stance on Catholicism led some Christian bookstores to stop stocking his tracts, and he withdrew from the Christian Booksellers Association after the association considered expelling him. Christianity Today described Chick as an example of "the world of ordinary, nonlearned evangelicals", for whom "atavistic anti-Catholicism remains as colorful and unmistakable as ever". Michael Ian Borer, a sociology professor of Furman University at the time, showed Chick's strong anti-Catholic themes in a 2007 American Sociological Association presentation and in a peer-reviewed article the next year in Religion and American Culture. Chick responded to these accusations by saying that he was opposed to the Roman Catholic Church as a sociopolitical organization, but not to its individual members. On his "Roman Catholicism FAQ", Chick said he began publishing his theories about the Roman Catholic Church because "he loves Catholics and wants them to be saved through faith in Jesus".