"Who, me?"

Even though my father, a coal miner, had little extra money when I was a kid, I received a small allowance and I promptly spent it on comic books. I was crazy for them and they were only twelve cents or at most a quarter each, and like many boys I collected and traded them. I still have a few of the oldest comics, and I still like graphic novels.

But a very different kind of comic was even more popular and successful in its way than Marvel or DC. The 1960s and 70s of my childhood were a golden age for "Jack Chick" comics, tiny booklets of twenty pages or so, not much larger than a dollar bill, with garish two-color covers. They didn't look anything like my superhero comics—they were blunter, static, splashed with blood-red and ominous cross-hatching. (Underground comix artists were heavily influenced by them.) Each little Chick tract had some kind of super-conservative evangelical message, often homophobic, anti-Freemason, anti-Jew, and anti-Catholic, anti-alcohol, anti-premarital sex—sometimes all of the above—with the kind of gory imagery you might expect in an EC comic.

For Chick, rock music was a portal to ever-lasting torment and Halloween a satanic ritual; the Devil was everywhere and was fighting hard for your soul. Chick's comics showed teenagers overdosing on marijuana and going on a killing spree, or being lured into some free-thought cult, or young person standing at the Pearly Gates confronting all the terrible sins they'd committed, such as daydreaming in church.

The little tracts were free and you'd find them everywhere—phone booths, diners, random store shelves, and certainly in any church youth group in the Bible Belt. Because of their religious prejudice and apocalyptic world view, bookstores wouldn't carry compilations of them and at one point they were banned in Canada as hate speech. But the tracts were unstoppable: By the 1990s half a billion of them had circulated, and New Yorker writer Daniel Raeburn called Chick "the most widely read theologian in human history."

The tracts were ostensibly offering a path to hope and salvation; instead they were actually tiny horror comics, often complete with a red devil with horns and a pitchfork. The point of the tracts was to lead the reader to the only choice that matters: repent and completely submit to a savior, or face eternal damnation in a fiery pit of Hell. They aimed to make the reader so afraid they dare not risk it.

As a kid I had no idea who distributed them but they were everywhere, just lying there for the taking, and I slipped any new ones I found into my pocket until I had amassed a huge collection. I didn't tell anyone.

For me, at least, because I was free to read anything I could lay my hands on, the tracts offered a third option than Heaven or Hell: Laughter. I was guilty of many of the soul-endangering sins Chick drew but somehow knew from the very first one that they made fundamentalist religion so gloriously ridiculous that I could safely (if quietly) make fun of it, even though it was the dominant worldview there in the Bible Belt. Sometimes the best tool for questioning authority is the ability to recognize how ludicrous it is.

Chick died in 2016, so has his own Eternal Answer now, but his company continues to put out those tiny hate-filled comics. I haven't read any in years and can't imagine today's media-savvy kids taking them seriously, but there are plenty of other ways to scare them with religion. I hope young people are finding a way to laugh back.