Chick Tracts/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Aesop: The antics in the tracts often send the unintended message of "God is a dick who will send even good people to hell for not accepting my religion, meanwhile serial killers who do get off with no punishment."
    • "Lisa": Finding Christ absolves you of sexually abusing your own daughter
    • Further from this, "You can kill as many people and steal and burn as many things as you want, if you accept Jesus right before death, you'll be marked as a good person and thus won't have to face any consequences."
    • "The Contract": Feel free to make a deal with the devil; you won't have to hold up your end.
    • "Wounded Children": You should do what a demon tells you. No, really. When some people attack Brian, the demon tells David to help him. Brian dies because he didn't.
    • "Fairy Tales?": The intended message was not to lie to your children, but it comes across as being "always question authority" (especially your parents).
    • "Flight 144": Going to heaven requires that you've accepted Jesus, and no amount of good deeds will change that. However, the protagonists who end up going to hell despite years of humanitarian work are a reverend and his wife, i.e. they must have fulfilled Chick's own requirements for going to heaven by aggressively converting people. As such, it comes off as God punishing them for doing good works.
  • Accidental Innuendo: "But you have been trapped in a dungeon of bondage." And then there's his site, chick.com, which probably gets quite a few hits from people looking for porn.
  • Anvilicious: A deliberate hallmark of his tracts.
  • Broken Base: It should go without saying, but lots of Christians -- even lots of fundamentalist Christians -- consider many of Chick's views to be, at best, a bit out there. Fred Sanders (a Christian theologian and cartoonist) remarks:

"In the heyday of the Christian bookstore, you could gauge how far to the right a store was by which Chick tracts they would stock. His worst stuff embarrasses even people who would be inclined to agree with him. You can hear them saying, 'Well, heck, I’m an anti-Catholic KJV-only separatist fundamentalist just like the next guy, but some of that Chick stuff is just crazy!'”

    1. Many cases involve Offstage Villainy, but The Bull killing a guard counts as a terrible on-screen act. However, the number of on-panel atrocities tends to be limited, possibly a move by Chick to prevent readers from seeing them as Moral Event Horizon crossings.
    2. In many cases, especially Carlos Gomez and the Bull, the characters are especialy dreaded for their actions prior to converting, and the tracts play up how terrible they seem although as above, these tend to be Offstage Villainy.
    3. Most of these characters don't have any of their past revealed, much less anything that makes them sympathetic
    4. Similarly, most of them do not show any altruistic qualities prior to conversion.
  • Don't Shoot the Message: A lot of Christians are embarrassed by Chick.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Fang, a bizarre pet that seems to be a cross between a dog, cat, fox and rabbit, and continually makes background appearances. It's the sabre teeth and a saw-tail. And being the only character who never speaks.
    • The Grim Reaper. "Hi there!"
  • Esoteric Happy Ending:
    • The tracts very frequently end with the death of one or several of the protagonists, so that a "judgment after death" scene can occur. This means that sometimes, protagonists die in cruel or painful ways, but due to the fact that they go to heaven, the tract treats it as a happy, even joyfoul ending (seen in, e.g. "Somebody Loves Me" and "Bewitched?"). Special mention to "The Little Sneak", where the eponymous bad boy undergoes a Heel Face Turn by 'accepting Jesus' -- then is struck by lightning and goes to Heaven; next, without any further explanation, his parents die too -- so the family is happily reunited in Heaven. The End.
    • Even the people who live after their conversion may have lingering emotional scars, and there's often a fair amount of undeserved forgiveness and avoiding punishment in the name of turning the other cheek. And the tracts welcome the end of days, in which the true believers are whisked away to heaven while the majority suffer, die and go to hell.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Quite frequently. Some specific examples;
    • "The Bully": "Even someone whose bullying caused people to reject Jesus and end up in Hell might repent and go to Heaven."
    • "Fat Cats": "Meet the New Boss, same as the old boss."
    • "The Gunslinger": "Sometimes the villain repents and goes to Heaven while the hero is self-righteous and goes to Hell."
    • "Lisa": Viewing pornography and a breakdown in one's marriage leads to molesting children, among other things--or vice-versa.
      • Also that raping a child, infecting her with an incurable STD, and allowing your neighbor to do the same is perfectly acceptable so long as you become a very certain type of fundamentalist Christian afterwards (hell you wont even face any real world punishment), wheras not being a very certain type of fundamentalist Christian gets you thrown into hell even if you were a good person in life.
    • "The Littlest Bride": "Muslims are pedophiles, and cultural Values Dissonance is no excuse."
    • "Why No Revival?": Why aren't things going well for Christianity? Because of Moral Myopia, because Good Is Not Nice, because of Holier Than Thou attitudes... Jack Chick wants his fellow Christians to know: you're falling down on the job here! Even more tellingly, he makes note of the fact that the tract is not for the unsaved, possibly because he doesn't want them to see what's wrong with Christians.
    • "Uninvited": Homosexuals are that way because they were molested as children.
    • Many different tracts: God is an asshole and doesn't care about your good deeds. It's OK to be a bad person as long as you tell people you believe in Jesus. This was presumably meant to indicate that it's never too late to turn over a new leaf and go from a lifetime of evil to doing good, but comes off as suggesting that with a simple prayer, even unforgivable actions no longer weigh down your soul.
      • The horrifying truth is that these are not Family Unfriendly Aesops by accident, but by choice. Jack Chick really believes these messages.
    • Also God will cause untold death and suffering on innocents because Chick thinks their nation wronged Israel and/or the Jews at some point in their history. He then states that Jesus will personally save Israel during the Apocalypse and will damn all the people who live in nations who have ever (in Chick's mind) wronged Israel and the Jews to hell..... yet he explicitly states that the Jews are all damned to hell for not believing in Jesus and killing him on the cross. The implication here being that Jesus wants no harm to come for the Jews because he wants to send them to hell personally.
      • This troper, who happens to be a Christian, thinks the implication here is that Chick doesn't know the Bible as well as he thinks he does, was trolling, or is an idiot.
  • Glurge: Oceans and oceans worth! "Somebody Loves Me" is the canonical example, though.
  • Ho Yay: A surprising amount, even if all of the obviously gay villains are omitted with a Special Les Yay mention going to "Best Friend".
  • Mary Sue, mostly Fixer Sue: Bob is one of the very rare examples of being a pure version in his own canon. He doesn't get enough Character Development to overlap with anything else, as he's mostly the person who happens to be here, usually knowing the characters involved somehow or being at the right place at the right time.
  • Memetic Mutation: The images from the Sandwich Chef meme came from this tract.
  • Misaimed Fandom: Chick tracts are intended to be passed on indefinitely, but most people who pick them up (and don't throw them away) keep them. Many people actually collect them. Then there are the people who think they are parodies.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Averted in Chick's eyes, as utterly terrible people can convert and go to heaven. Whether the readers or the characters can forgive those people is another question, though.
  • Narm: Chick Tracts are full of supposedly serious, dramatic scenes that fail to make their intended impression on most readers. Take, for example, the [[media:Chick Tract_TheLittleSneak_8380.jpg|death of the eponymous hero]] of "The Little Sneak".
  • Snark Bait: Oooooohhhh yeeeeaaaah.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: See that trope's page for examples.
  • Ugly Cute: Demons in general are portrayed as crankily incompetent Card-Carrying Villains who look like grotesque Muppets. The gay demons in "Birds and the Bees", though, cross the line from goofy and non-threatening to downright adorable. Seriously, look at panel six [dead link].
  • Unfortunate Implications: The tract "The Little Sneak" of the "Black Tract" series is said to be for "older children". The whole story revolves around a family living in a straw-and-mud hut, where the boy steals the family savings and buries it in the backyard for no apparent reason. The entire tract is told with NO WORDS WHATSOEVER. (Except "No!")
    • One could argue that the very fact that there is a separate tract series just for black people is this trope.
  • Values Dissonance: The extreme fundamentalist rhetoric clashes with many people harder than a fly clashes with the windshield of a car on a highway. Including the vast majority of Christians, as they typically don't hate everyone. Even those who do hate the tracts.
    • In The Traitor, an in-universe example comes up when the Hindu priest Ramu asks the Christian protagonist about how powerful Jesus is, asking about traits such as how many heads he has, what weapon he uses and the sacrifices he demands. It also falls into Unfortunate Implications by making Ramu (and Hindus as a whole, by extension) seem barbaric.
    • Chick's feeling the need to have special"black editions" of tracts.

Adapted for black audiences.

      • The implication being that black people are so different they need their own special versions of tracts already made. Bonus for Chick in-that he doesn't have to come up with any new material, he just makes the good artists make new drawings for them.
      • Your Big Moment "is drawn specifically for black women" and You Have a Date is "tailored for women." They're both adaptations of This Was Your Life which already had a "black adaptation" in It's Your Life.
  • The Woobie: Quite a few of them, in fact. The protagonists of "Unloved", "Somebody Loves Me", "Lisa", and "The Poor Little Witch" -- to name a few. Also, the various characters who end up being tossed into hell could be considered unintentional examples of this trope.
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