World Series and Crazy Christians

I am getting lazy lazy about blogging, but have to come in here for this - the World Series starts tonight - with some good old fashioned curses on the line. Cubs and Indians! Though for me, it looks like a Red Sox intramural game - Tito, Napoli, Miller, Coco Crisp vs. Theo, Lester, Lackey, Anthony Rizzo (probably why Theo is in Chicago - if AdGon had worked out in Boston, he and Tito might still be there...) Fun times!

All logic dictates the Cubs to win. If the Indians had their full compliment of pitchers, it would be close to a toss up, since with Kluber, Salazar, Carrasco and Tomlin, they would be a match for anyone. As it is - Cubs just have more at their disposal. And some big game players in there - Lester going for his third ring, Lackey too... But still - I think I might root for the Indians. Underdogs - and not the Cubs. Much as I like this edition, they are the Cubs...

Meanwhile - as far from that as you can get - I read that Jack Chick has died. Well - not completely unrelated. Chick's tracts - the little ones, the ones people handed out at camp meetings and on the streets - have always been around me, and I got to read a good sample fo them when I was a kid. I always remember This Was Your Life - some smug asshole gets struck dead at a party and goes before the throne of god to be confronted with his sins. Typical camp meeting style scare mongering "evangelism" - with a line I couldn't ignore. At one point our damned hero is sitting in church - he's all excited - "see! I went to church!" - but god can read minds: "I wonder who's winning the ball game?" That's a burning offense! And poor me, sitting in some church service, wondering who was, in fact, winning the ball game, or who would make the all star game, or whatever occupied my mind, thought, well - I guess I am one of the damned too....

So: now he is dead, Mr. Chick. Im not sure if it's more surprising that he was still alive, or that he existed at all - there is something about those little tracts that suggests an elaborate joke of some kind. Dark dungeons, in particular, has taken on a pretty strong half life as a camp classic - but a lot of them have that effect. Even when I was a kid and subject to that kind of pressure more than I care to admit, Chick tracts were almost amusing, and somehow extremely compelling. I think it's the art - the simple, crude, mostly realistic style - it was within my reach, maybe. I wished I could draw, tell stories in pictures (and words), and those tracts showed a way to do it. Maybe. I know that - here's an irony for you - the look of those comics had the same effect that the art in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books had, especially the incidental art in the DMG - "no honor among thieves" - the same pen and ink drawings, clear and quick points, little mini-narratives in every picture... like marginal doodles. I have a soft spot for that kind of art generally - illustrations in Hardy Boys books do the same thing. Great stuff. So - I could smirk at the heavy handed fire and brimstone stuff and admire the form, even in high school or before....

Though that didn't work so well when I came across some of the comic books he published. The Crusaders - sweet holy fucking Jesus! The tracts are fairly standard issue high pressure Repent or Go To Hell! "evangelism" or cheesy culture war stuff (taking on evolution, D&D or whatever). But the comics? I saw some of those when I was in high school still - fairly innocuous things about smuggling bibles into Russia or whatever - but in college, I came across the harder stuff. One of the guys had a pile of them he'd let people read - and these... I guess it's the "Alberto" stuff that really took the prize: a former Jesuit who found the truth and revealed the inner workings of the Catholic church. Yikes: they invented communism, evolution, satanism, nazism, homosexuality and rock and roll (if I remember it right), all while priests and nuns fucked like rabbits and filled tunnels with aborted fetuses.... I don't think that is hyperbole. They were astonishing, those comics - both for their virulent anti-Catholicism (in 1979! I still heard some ant-papists running around in the 70s and 80s, but even the worst of them weren't accusing the pope of founding both the communists and nazis), and for the batshit insanity of it all. It was stuff straight from the good old days, 19th century know nothing anti-catholic propaganda (rather specifically: I saw the same stories in 19th century anti-Catholic tracts)... horror show stuff, played - kind of straight. Though like a lot of things, it's hard to tell the difference between someone trying to seriously argue that the pope founded the communist and nazi parties, and someone parodying the idea, to make a good horror story...

Anyway. I can't deny, I found those things fascinating - the tracts anyway. The comics, trying for a more sophisticated style, plus their plain evil, were less interesting. Read them once and walk away... But the tracts - people still hand them out on the streets once in a while and I look them over with that odd mix of amusement and revulsion, and, well, envy - at some weird level, making art, no matter what the purpose, offers something like redemption, even for evil people and evil art. Maybe that attitude goes back to Chick, just a bit - the split between the stupidity and viciousness of the content, and the inherent value of being able to express yourself is very strong in some of those tracts. I suppose I am one of the damned - damned to formalism. There are worse things, though.