Jack Chick obit

Jack Chick, religious cartoonist and publisher, dies at 92

He was not on the list.

Jack T. Chick’s most popular tract, published in 1964, is titled “This Was Your Life!” Riffing on the then-popular reality-TV series, it tells the story of a high-living atheist who drops dead of a heart attack and is whisked to the gates of heaven, forced to review his life’s lowlights and, too late, plead for forgiveness.

Chick, who died Sunday at age 92 at home in San Dimas, would expect a better reception, the one given to the protagonist in the tract’s second ending, in which the man has repented.

Chick Publications’ Facebook page illustrated its announcement of its founder’s death with the final panel of that alternate ending, in which a faceless man on a throne surrounded by light says: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant — enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!”

“He wanted one thing, to go in his sleep,” employee David Daniels said Monday. “And God granted it.”

Based in a low-profile office in Rancho Cucamonga since 1970, Chick Publications has sent out nearly 900 million tracts in 102 languages. The pocket-sized tracts, stapled on the side, with white-on-black titles and simple art, are instantly recognizable and much parodied.

He’s said to be the world’s most published living author, his books displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and praised by underground comic artists such as Robert Crumb. Some comics fans and creators, including “Ghost World” artist and scenarist Daniel Clowes, have been fascinated by his work even while finding it repellent.

Rocker Jack White cited him in a 2014 song, “Black Bat Licorice”: “She writes letters like a Jack Chick comic/Just a bunch of propaganda to make my fingers histrionic.”

Monday, “Daily Show” senior writer Daniel Radosh tweeted: “Jack Chick has died. Setting aside, well, everything else about him & his message, he did amazingly weird, influential outsider art.”

“The reclusive king of the scaremongers, Chick railed against everything from gay rights and Dungeons & Dragons to Freemasonry and the Catholic church — which he believed instigated the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution and the Civil War …” wrote the A.V. Club pop-culture website about his death.

His books have been banned in Canada, denounced by Christianity Today and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and ejected from Christian bookstores.

Daniels, the company’s author and researcher since 2000 who said he was Chick’s chosen successor, said Chick is misunderstood as hateful when really he was a humble, hard-working man who produced “love literature,” not hate literature.

 

 “He was a plain, ordinary guy who liked to draw. He was just a guy who wanted to please the Lord, use his drawings for God and help other people not go to hell. And that was it.”

He is survived by his second wife, Susy. Services will be private.

Chick was born in Boyle Heights in 1924, attended Alhambra High, won a scholarship to the Pasadena Playhouse School of Theater and served in World War II. He married in 1948 and converted to Christianity while visiting his in-laws in Canada, where he heard a radio broadcast from the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium by Charles E. Fuller.

Chick worked as a technical illustrator for an aerospace company in El Monte and would draw at home at night, according to a 2003 profile by Robert Ito in Los Angeles magazine.

A shy man, he chose comics over the pulpit after hearing a radio missionary explain how the Chinese used comics as propaganda. His first tract was published in 1960.

The reclusive Chick did not speak to Ito, who wrote that Chick had last given an interview in 1975. He did, however, speak in 1997 to former Daily Bulletin reporter Mike Cicchese, who interviewed him for 10 minutes in Chick’s driveway.

He was tending to his ailing wife and daughter, both of whom have since died.

“Most of my time is spent caring for them, picking up prescriptions and doing the tracts,” Chick said. “I don’t even know what’s going on in the Christian world today. They’re all playing footsie with the Vatican. It’s all about money.”

During the conversation, two Jehovah’s Witnesses walked up the driveway and handed Chick a copy of The Watchtower, not realizing the recipient had published a tract, “The Crisis,” calling their religion false.