Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

Through Charlie’s ants, young readers learn that God became man to die for us. Great salvation message! A story about a little boy and the three sexy ants he sends out on missions of espionage and intrigue. Actually, this is yet another cartoony, oversimplified (even more so than the adult-oriented ones) one aimed at kids. Get ‘em while they’re young! Nip their independent and rational thought in the bud, before it gets a chance to blossom! It’s also yet another failed attempt at a metaphor for God, and is just plain fucking silly in general.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Ants are so neat, the way they go around hauling food, piling up dirt, spontaneously bursting into flames somehow whenever I look too closely at them…”

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Thirty years later, he grew up to say the exact same thing about the five-year-old girls he kept nude and chained to the wall in his basement. At first glance, I thought his mouth was his nose and his actual nose was a stylized bump on his larger, more bulbous nose, and that his mouth was obscured by the magnifying glass, which all for some reason made his creepy, pervy little statement seem even worse. “Like my dress? Some guy said it looked so hot I could fry eggs on it. So I did! Want one?” “No thanks, I’m already working on this glass lollipop.”

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	What the… fuck? Just… all of it, the kid standing on his head (or maybe standing right-side up but with an inverted internal physiology, as possibly implied by the position of the speech bubble), the suddenly enormous ants burying the kids up to their knees, the blubbering, head-shaking, chipmunky, gaping, horrified expression, ears like the bells of goddamned trumpets… damn. How delightfully surreal. What does he mean by “this land”, anyway? All of America? Why not “this place” or “this area”? Actually, in this panel, he looks a little like I’d imagine Uncle Whatsisfuck from The Missing Day would’ve looked as a child.

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	All right, so far, we’ve gone from regular-sized ants to ants the size of a fist burying the kids in a mound up to their knees to a tiny kid running toward a mountainous ant hill populated by dog-sized ants. If they keep growing like this, I think they’re going to be just fine by the time the place is flooded. (Yeah, yeah, I know Jack is trying for a more challenging angle and all, but come on.) So this kid’s apparently so incredibly, profoundly fucking stupid that he thinks ants will understand English. Hey, kid, doesn’t look like it’s working. Maybe you should try French or Morse Code or semaphore or something.

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	At first, I thought this was going to end up being a metaphor for Noah. But now that he’s furiously striking the ground because the ants can’t understand him, screaming that by hurting them he’s saving them, this is obviously a metaphor for the fundie God. “Everyone! In my mouth! Right now! Come on, hurry! I’ll take you to safety!”

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Can I use your ants to show you something really important?” “I guess so.” “Okay, see this ant? See his little legs? He’s got six of ‘em. See his little antennae feeling around, trying to figure out what’s going on? And how he’s got this little bit of food or something between his front pincers? And his little exoskeleton? Okay, now, see how I’m using this ant to gesture toward that ambulance over in front of your house? Well, your mom’s dead.” Looks like she’s got a bad case of navel-mouth. Seems like a pretty common childhood disease in the Chick universe. Erm, I hate to be a pedant, but all you really need to communicate with ants are some ant pheromones. “You know, you could also, uh… collect the ants in, like, a jar or something and move them to, say, your back yard or an ant farm or something. But that’s totally beyond your power, seeing as you lack opposable thumbs and the ability to move your body or obtain a jar. Just like with God — he had to go through a painstaking, elaborate, and extremely contrived process to try to help humanity. He couldn’t just, y’know, outright forgive people or let them into heaven. It was totally beyond his power.”

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Give up everything? Since when is an omnipotent being creating a physical avatar considered “giving up everything”? If truly omnipotent, God could’ve created an infinite number of Jesuses, and he could’ve made them rain down from the sky ceaselessly for generations, splatting one on top of the other until people finally gave in and agreed to do anything he demanded. She’s kind of overstating the “sacrifice”, here. “But I do love them! I mean, I fuck them… that’s kinda love, I guess…” “YUK! You gave me navel-mouth! Don’t you know it’s contagious?”

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	That’s spectacularly assumptive. You tell someone they’re in danger and it makes them kill you? What kind of fucked up… Why couldn’t the ants just not give a shit? “Eh, some guy keeps talking about some big disaster. What do you guys think? I just wanna dig some more holes.” “Yeah, whatever. We die, we die.” Also, how do you say “Shut up, Charlie!” in pheromones? FANG! Hooray, looks like he’s featured pretty heavily in this one. I think Skinhead Dennis the Menace back there is trying to tell us he’s going to try shoving Antigrav Cat’s tail into his left eye.

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	HIDEOUS FUNDAMENTALIST CHILD: HE DOESN’T HAVE TO GIVE HIS LIFE FOR THE ANTS! IT’S REALLY FUCKING SIMPLE! HE JUST HAS TO GET A GODDAMNED JAR AND MOVE THEM SOMEWHERE ELSE! “No way! I don’t love — Ooooh, my cheek is so soft.” Yeah, no human ever gave their life for anyone before. Never happened. Here’s the wind-up…

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	…and the pitch! So why didn’t God send down an Ant Jesus, then, if he fuckin’ loves ants so goddamn much? “God loves it because he created it” isn’t anywhere near sound reasoning. There’s no cause/effect to be found at all in that assumption. What is WITH that kid? Is he not subject to gravitational forces or something? So we’ve got Antigrav Cat and Antigrav Kid. Not only does he have a saw for a tail, apparently Fang’s nose is a bug zapper! What can’t that dog do?

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	GYAH! KILL IT WITH FIRE! IN FACT, GATHER ALL THESE HIDEOUS LITTLE SHIT-JUGGLERS INTO A PILE AND JUST TORCH THE WHOLE LOT OF ‘EM! I’m picturing her going “PTTTHHHHBLBLBL TTHHHHHHHH PFTHHHHH PTHHHHH” here. Urgent message to Antigrav Kid’s ass: INCOMING BIRD. “But long ago, God lied to the people he’d made. When they discovered the truth and acted on it, they were in real trouble! From God!”

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	No, it all started when God created two incredibly stupid but curious people, gave vague and arbitrary instructions about a tree, and then was shocked — SHOCKED! — when they disobeyed him, bettering themselves in the process. Really informative Bible quote, by the way. “For all have sinned…” …and? Fang apparently burned out his bug-zapper nose in the stream. Is that a bird riding a meteor, over on the left? Why can’t God let sin into heaven? Who or what is stopping him? Shouldn’t THAT force be the real God, if it’s more powerful than God? I… I don’t quite understand.

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Bahahahaha. What? How the fuck did he arrive at that conclusion? “Gee, how could an omnipotent being save lowly humans from being rejected from heaven? Let’s see… he’d have to… become a MAN! That’s it!” Like, “so how could the rescue workers in New Orleans save the people effected by Hurricane Katrina? I know! They’d have to become bloated, floating corpses!” Or, “so how could the man save the dog from its abusive owner? He’d have to become a dog!” Just… so stupid. Now the Littlest Skinhead’s goose-stepping. Someone get that fucker some Ritalin or something.

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	In a smelly stable, people. SMELLY. “Okay, so, all the people you know who are dead are fucked right now. Oops! That’s our bad, but there’s nothing we can do — we’re only fucking omnipotent. But sorry, your mommy and your daddy and your older siblings who’ve all kicked it — they’re all getting their faces raped by the spiny dicks of demons, and will be for the rest of time. They didn’t know about me — because hey, I wasn’t born yet — so they’re fucked. GOD IS LOVE. Now, someone come up here and pull my finger.” What’s with the dude in the sport coat over a black shirt? Were those in fashion back in about A.D. 25?

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Jews! What’s… I don’t… where’s the… where is gravity, here? Her hair’s being pulled up toward the top of the panel, her body seems to be pulled toward the right, Charlie is standing up (or maybe hanging from a tree branch? Though, no, then his magnifying glass would be falling out of his back pocket), Antigrav Cat and the Floating Skinhead seem to be getting pulled toward the left… I… don’t know. And what’s he trying to do to her arm?

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Ah, gravity apparently went suddenly back to normal. Yep, Jesus was the only person who was ever hurt “REAL BAD“.

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Blah blah blah. I hope he doesn’t re-draw this one each time. He should really just get a rubber stamp made of it.

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Wow! That all makes me want to clench my fists, lean forward and have a really explosive, violent fart! HERE IT COMES!” *PTHHHHHHPUPUPUPUPPPLLLLPPPPLLLPPP* So we’ll be forced to live in mansions forever? Why is everything in the afterlife an infinite, unchangeable outcome? Wouldn’t that very idea be hell for some people?

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Uh-oh, their Spider-Senses are tingling. I’d like to think he’s riding the kid like an emu or something, here, ’cause that’s kind of what it looks like.

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“You must believe that Jesus died on the cross for you. But you must also… pull my finger.” Girl should become a dominatrix. She wouldn’t even need to buy a whip, she could just let that wild, goofy pony tail whip around on her head like she always does. “HOMPH HOMPH MMM, YOU GUYS HURMPH HOMPH I NEVER THOUGHT THESE ANTS WOULD BE SO TASTY HURMPF HOMPF GLOMPH”

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“I feel GREAT! Addiction to the neurochemicals that result from induced, powerful emotions is a BLAST!” That is totally that Peter Paul kid from Palindromes. “We just LOVE our new lion haircuts! Thanks, Jesus!” “No, Charlie, this is how you squeeze a nipple. Thumb and index finger, see? And cupping, like this.”

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Oh, I see, that’s their kid. Ahhh, that explains why he’s so fucked up. “Now I’m going to be a smug little fucko with a moral/cultural/national superiority complex who thinks that my way of living is somehow intrinsically preferable to that of anyone else! And somehow, I’ve magically figured out how posture works! Go fundamentalism!” Jeez, kid, get a fucking comb. You know, Jack never did resolve that whole “ants” subplot. All that buildup, and now we’ll never know whether the ants get flooded or whether Charlie figures out that, y’know, ants are fucking movable. Anyway, until next time.

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