Jack T. Chick

Chick was a particularly divisive figure among his fellow cartoonists, whose arguments about the fanatical artist were concerned as much with aesthetics as morality. Many cartoonists, especially in the tradition of underground and alternative cartooning that emerged in the 1960s (most famously the scandalous Robert Crumb) have an intense admiration for Chick, extolling his undeniable passion and heartfelt quirkiness.

Chick’s tracts had a disturbing power to make you see the world through his eyes, a squirrelly and sweaty vantage point where everything is a demonic conspiracy to rob you of your soul. Chick started off as a garden variety magazine cartoonist in the Virgil Partch mold, but stretched that genial idiom to encompass nightmarish Boschian imagery. (Chick drew most of his tracts, although some were also drawn by an artist named Fred Carter, who had a more naturalistic style,strangely similar to the homoeroticTom of Finland series created byTouko Valio Laaksonen.)

Demons played a big part in Chick’s work, and he was gifted at endowing them with a visceral reality. Chick believed in the demons he drew; they were as real to him as the people he met when he walked down the street. He was sufficiently talented as an artist that he could almost make you believe in his visions of sly, sneering impish demons trying to snare humans at every turn. A deft hand at grotesque caricature, Chick was more successful at drawing sin than sainthood. He was perhaps best at capturing the sneer of pride in those rejecting faith and the bug-eyed fear of non-believers who learn, too late, that they are doomed to Hellfire.

All of this was in the service of winning converts. Chick rarely gave interviews, except in his own in-house publications. In one of these self-promotional interviews he said, “[M]y main thrust is soul-winning. Right now, Christians are self-satisfied and complacent. God’s got a handful of people out there who really mean business, but the rest are playing games.”

“He had authentic greatness,” Kim Deitch, one of the stalwarts of American alternative comics for nearly 50 years, told me in a Facebook exchange. “He knew how to use the comics medium. You didn’t have to agree with his point of view to appreciate the compelling way he could [carry] a story over.” Deitch’s admiration perhaps stems from his being a sort of secular counterpart to Chick. Since the late 1960s, when his work first appeared in The East Village Other, a small New York underground newspaper, Deitch has produced hundreds of pages of off-the-wall comics exploring an elaborate private mythology featuring characters likeWaldo the Cat and Jesus Christ. Deitch’s work is revered by fellow cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb and Chris Ware, but it hasn’t won the same level of fame with the general public as the esteem it has within the world of alternative comics. Deitch has become a model for other cartoonists thank to his persistence in producing visionary comics in a world where artistic merit and commercial success rarely overlap.

Sammy Harkham, who edits the much-admired comics anthologyKramers Ergot, sees an affinity between Chick and counterculture cartoonists. “Chick was great,” Harkham emailed me. “A true folk artist. I would find [his tracts] in random places in Sydney Australia in the mid-nineties, and it was like burrowing deep into the mind of a maniac. But a maniac that seemingly had no desire to be loved or respected by the wider culture and in that way I felt him to have a certain kinship with the cartoonists and other writers and artists who made deeply felt, idiosyncratic work.... I don’t agree or relate to Chick’s perspective on the world, I respect and love how much he stood apart from it all.”

SOURCE :newsrepublic.com