Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

“When a priceless carpet is permanently stained, its owner learns that only Jesus’ blood can remove the stain of sin.” See? Good things CAN come from staining carpets, mom.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	The only accident here was that someone mistakenly filled their flask with crude oil.

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	The emphasis on “priceless treasures” just makes it sound sarcastic. Like the place contains The World’s Largest Human Booger, or necklaces made of toenails, or a chandelier made from beer bottles, or Smelliest Dog Corpse of the British Isles. Wow, how “fascinating” that a famous treasure would be kept in a locked room. THE VERY THOUGHT OF IT MYSTIFIES AND CONFUSES ME, DAWSON. YOU’RE TOTALLY BLOWING MY MIND. Also: The implication, apparently, is that there are no other locked rooms at Winthorp Castle.

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	I have no idea what is taking place in the first panel. I think the old man is arresting a tiger while simultaneously giving the Maharajah a shoulder rub. And he’s apparently wearing armor, or a clam shell on his shoulder, for some reason. Wait a minute, that’s not Dawson at all! It’s Professor Moriarty, arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes! “[N]ineteen years”, huh? I’ll explain this in just a moment.

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Oh, come on - that’s merely a tolerable kitchen, mediocre at best. In the time you’ve spent standing here discussing the box, had you actually just picked it up and done the job yourself, you probably could’ve been halfway to delivering it to him by now. Way too much emphasis on “STRAIGHT“. It seems stressed to the point that she wants him to walk in a perfect line, through any walls that might be in the way. And why has Lord Winthorp hired some kind of pig-human chimera, anyway?

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So there’s only one locked room at Winthorp Castle… and they leave the key in it. You know you’re going to run into problems if you hire someone with stink lines. You’re really just asking for it. Aww, a cute little mousy!

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	He was speechless because he actually is, it turns out, literally this painting.

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“The ‘Carpet of Snow’. It was woven from the hairs of white tigers. And, uh, daddy Winthorp used to store all his blow under it.” “I have it brushed twice daily! Huh-hyuk huh-hyuk! And I will squeeze it and feed it and I will name it George!” Man, Dawson really hasn’t aged well since, uh, four panels ago. This can’t be the same guy. Whither our dashin’ young Dawson, wif ‘is jaunty top ‘at an’ ‘is proud jaw’r an’ ‘is smashin’ mutton chops? Ah, the fetishes of nobility. “Your majesty, I have this really nice carpet that I just got that I want you to come over and walk on for me.” You know, as shitty as Chick’s drawings can be, I do kind of enjoy his MAD Magazine-style “put something kooky in the background” stuff in a few of the panels in this one. HAHA! A SPIDER IS COMING DOWN IN FRONT OF THE PAINTING, AND THE PAINTING IS LOOKING AT IT NERVOUSLY!

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Whoa, who the hell’s this, now? Winthorp’s got the horrifying and improbable offspring of Yoda and Glenn Shadix for a doorman? The once in a lifetime event of walking on a fur rug! HOLY SHIT.

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	This treasure is priceless beyond measure, woven from the fur of white tigers. Which is why I’m going to slam open the door like a fucking moron! You know, with a cap that loose on something that’s apparently ink or oil, they were just asking for trouble. Especially when they handed it to the guy with the stink lines and sent him past the only locked room with a key in the door. WHACK! SPLASH MOUSE! Is that birch bark wallpaper or Morse Code?

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	You might think his reaction is a little overblown, but dammit, that rug really tied the room together. He’s either glowing brightly, or turning into a Batman action. I can’t decide which. Ah, the days before Oxy-Clean. How did mankind ever survive?

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	And, of course, the new guy is rolled up inside. Though, this kind of begs the question: If Winthorp doesn’t allow anything with a stain on it in his house, then why did he hire the new guy with the obvious stink lines in the first place? Okay, a trivial nitpick, here, returning to the “nineteen years” thing, from above: Reportedly, an indeterminate number of “the Maharajah’s people spent nineteen years” working on this thing. Now, given this shot of the rug (and ignoring, for a moment, its apparent Escherian construction - follow the roll, and you’ll notice it somehow switches directions somewhere in the middle), using the mouse for scale, it’s about maybe twelve by thirty feet, tops. Now, according to this article on the weaving of Persian carpets, which, I think, can serve as an accurate representation of carpet weaving in general, “Each nine-square-meter Persian carpet takes one year to be woven.” That’s the equivalent of about 96.9 square feet. The rug, if the estimated proportions of the illustration are accurate, would be about 360 square feet. Thus, it would have only taken about 3 3/4 years to complete this rug, under normal production circumstances. Of course, one would think the Maharajah would’ve had his people put a greater, more concentrated effort into this particular carpet. Even giving Jack the benefit of the doubt of some extra width and length in the carpet and adding a couple additional years of production, “nineteen years” would still be more than double the expected production time. And in the illustration with the old man and the tiger and the Maharajah, granddaddy Winthorp looks sixty at the youngest, so one would think the Maharajah would know to send a gift that the man would have a reasonable likelihood of seeing before he died.

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“God in Heaven” as opposed to, what, God Johnson down the street? God in Mexico? God in an Applebee’s? “What do you mean by that, Dr. Carlton?” “I mean, sir, that you’re a petty pyromaniac asshole who overreacts to insignificance and condemns beautiful things over expectable flaws that you really should’ve been able to predict.” Nah, they’re alike in that they both get a ring of Batman Action spikes around them when they get angry. “There’s a stain on your soul because God lets there be a stain on your soul, regardless of how good a person you are. Instead of using his omnipotent powers to undo the ‘original sin’ of Adam, or to bring himself to just plain not give a shit about something so trivial as the creatures he created to be curious and stupid actually exploring the world around them, getting tricked and disobeying him, he instead created this arcane and generally baffling system that’s like a big game of Intangible Hide and Seek so that you can guess at what you’re supposed to do or think or feel and to what extent in order to not end up tortured for the rest of eternity. Which is, by the way, the default outcome for your life. Because he loves you.”

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Even if you lied to keep someone from having hurt feelings - even if they were suicidal and telling them the truth would’ve driven them to kill themselves. You’re still a horrible sinner in God’s eyes for any lie, at all, regardless of context, because God is apparently incapable of thinking complexly, and everything must be broken down into oversimplified dualities for his dullard mind. You unimaginable bastard.” Monocle off…

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	…and back on again. Plus, his legs appear to be coming right out of his chest, like his body just kind of skipped everything between the nipples and knees. I mean, I know Jack’s trying for perspective and all, but look where the top of the sheet is. It meets the bedpost. LA LA LA! I’M COMPLETELY GULLIBLE AND I’VE NEVER HEARD OF RELIGION BEFORE! Like, I dunno. I doubt people this stupid and weak-willed actually exist in real life, but if they did, I bet you could convince them of just about anything. You could convince them that, say, Wilford Brimley is really a magical dragon who eats insulin to retain his human form, and that he can be transformed back and banished to the hollow underground land of his ancestors beneath Mount Pinatubo using an amulet carried by Marc Linn-Baker the guy who played “Cousin Larry” on the sitcom Perfect Strangers, made from the bladder tumor of the late Telly Savalas preserved in the crystallized urine of Oprah Winfrey, and that in doing so, you rid everyone in the world of their sins, but take on the greatest sin of all, which can only be absolved by chanting the lyrics to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” through a hair comb embedded in an onion while a kid with Down Syndrome plays “Danny Boy” on an accordion as you both stand knee-deep in the blood of newborn ants. I mean, come on, anyone who just unquestioningly believes a contrived, random story about some arbitrary, unobservable, post-death protocol and a magical, all-powerful, imperceptible Sky-Daddy who stalks your every move and for whatever reason looks exactly like a human has got to buy just about any old bullshit. Like, what would be their limit, do you think? How unabashedly ridiculous would something have to be in order for them to stop, give you a funny look, and go “nuh-uhhh”?

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Should I become religious… and do good works?” “That will NOT remove the stain from your soul.” “Okay, good, can I kill this owl out on the ledge, then? I don’t like the way he looks at me, and he’s always asking me personal questions about the people I know.” You know, what the fuck’s the point? If actions are irrelevant, why even bother doing anything good at all? Of course, Jack seems to go back and forth on this, because if actions really are irrelevant, then it kind of destroys their argument about gays going to hell. There’s kind of a conflicting message going on here: A) “You can’t be gay or have pre-marital sex or (list of myriad other arbitrary things), because you’ll go to hell. All your actions are recorded, and will be played before God after you die!” B) “You can accept Jesus at any point prior to your death, and as long as you really super-duper mean it, regardless of what you did in life, you’ll go to heaven.” Meaning, of course, that having your life played back for you is kind of meaningless. Like, do you think God looks at the chart, looks at you, sighs, rolls his eyes (which he, as, y’know, an omnipotent being actually has, for some reason) and goes, “Aw, fuck, you found the loophole. Me-dammit. Well, enjoy. NEXT!”?

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Yes, we ALL deserve eternal torture because the first man and woman alive did a bad thing that earned them God’s disapproval. Even assuming Adam and Eve were real, wouldn’t that just make God the biggest and most petty of assholes, with an unbeatable record for grudge-holding? If a person can forgive their friend for sleeping with their significant other, or the family of a murder victim can forgive the killer, then don’t you think God - who, by the way, one would think wouldn’t be emotionally limited in the same way as lowly man - could forgive people he created as stupid and easily led and naturally curious for eating an apple he told them not to eat? And, as reader Dogmeat points out in the comments of the “In The Beginning” Dissection: In Genesis God tells Adam not to eat of the apple, “for on that day you shall surely die”. Meaning instant death, not death by aging. The serpent says that they will not die, but their eyes shall be opened, and that God knows this. After they eat the fruit, the scriptures themselves say that their eyes were opened. Doesn’t that make the serpent the one who told the truth? The painting in the background is angrily checking out the maid’s ass. And I’ll bet she’s thinking “Oh, no, someone’s got Master Winthorp all riled up again. Last time, Professor Wittingsly convinced him the butter was haunted.”

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	God demands innocent blood! Because he is, might I remind you, love. You know, he’s supposedly all powerful - why couldn’t he have people do some other arbitrary thing that doesn’t involve expunging a living thing? I dunno, hold a fish under your armpit, turn around three times and spit, or something. Comb a giraffe. Anything. Isn’t it kind of selfish to slaughter something innocent to cleanse your own sins? Not only is God a massive, massive prick for forcing people to perform this extremely arbitrary violent activity, he’s just plain horrible for eternally punishing people who couldn’t bring themselves to kill an innocent living thing. What the cock is that shit? You know, Lucifer only wanted to usurp the throne of God. God routinely tortures people for eternity, and for a long time demanded people kill innocent things for him or they, too, would be punished forever. (He’s also depicted as advocating a whole bunch of other horrible things, including genocide.) Who’s really “evil”, here? Or, better yet, fundies are always talking about how fossils are a trick of The Debbil. Of course, they’ve never stopped to wonder if these horrible things presumably being demanded of humans - like killing other people and the advocation of genocide and slaughtering innocent living things and bearing seething hatred for gays - isn’t all some kind of illusion that Satan or Lucifer or Michael Medved or whatever he calls himself uses to get people to do cruel and awful things without really intending to. It’s not necessarily “Once and for all” if it’s still this big stupid guessing game people have to play with contradicting, arbitrary rules governing behavior and action. And God’s supposedly omnipotent - there weren’t any easier and more effective and sweeping of solutions? I don’t really see, either, how embracing the sense of shame that came only after Adam and Eve ate the apple is supposed to get people closer to God.

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	The maid is now beating her head against the door in frustration. *THUNK* *THUNK* “Not again… it took months to get him to stop leaving fried eggs on the windowsills to ‘ward away the fitful spirit of Teddy Roosevelt’.” Spirits reproduce through overshadowing.

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	I like how the Bible was written long before anyone had any idea what “genetics” was. Omnipotent beings have blood, for some reason. If Jesus was an innocent with sinless blood because it was God’s blood, then do animals - who are also innocent and apparently sinless - have God’s blood, too? At least he got the nail positioning right. In most Christian imagery, they usually have the nails going through the palms, which would prove incapable of supporting the weight of a human and would tear through the hands.

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	It wouldn’t be a Chick Tract without this particular excerpt from the Bible in it. You know, one of about a dozen Jack is actually familiar with. I think Djur said it best: “It’s like I was mad at you, but then I cut myself and decided that was enough for you to be forgiven. Utterly ludicrous.”

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Heavens yes, Doctor, I believe every word you’re saying without question. Please tell me more about this… ‘Amway’ of which you speak.” Why do all of Chick’s antagonists look Jewish or have some kind of a stereotypically Jewish characteristic? Look at that hooked nose, for instance.

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Christ’s Salve(-ation) will take the hook right out of your nose!™ Repenting his sins has turned him into Michael Gross, apparently. “The stain is GONE! Un-burn the carpet, I think I can pray that stain out, too!”

Conclusion ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

Jesus Blood will get your whites whiter, your darks darker, and won’t fade your colors! Now available in “Ocean Mist” and “Spring Rain”. Stay tuned for more Chick Dissections. Tell your friends!

Further Reading ⇑ ⇓

Other Reviews & Commentaries ⇑