Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

In this children’s book, Li’l Susy tells her friend, Buffy, how Halloween got started, and how everyone must choose between Jesus and Satan. I think this is really stretching the definition of “book”, here. And seriously, how many fucking Halloween Tracts did Jack make? Anyway, total lies. To a hilarious extent, but still extremely painful.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Maleficent, The Little Ghost, and Shock. I’m okay with Disney and Squaresoft working together, but once they start collaborating with Jack Chick, they’ve really gone too far.

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“I’m scared, mommy! I’ll bet he has a nasty heroin habit and stars in shitty B movies!” Wait, her name’s Buffy, and she’s afraid of vampires? Come on! She should be jumping around driving stakes into their chests and being all flippant about the situation. You think that’s scary, kid, you should turn around and get a look at the cardboard cut-out witch gazing lovingly at the tray of severed, large-nippled breasts. “Tomorrow we’ll go buy you a spooky costume. Your Violet Beuregard outfit is cute and all, but isn’t really going to instill fear in any of your classmates.” You know, in a reality where the entire world becomes a white, infinite, formless sea, and the back ends of cars randomly disappear, I think some effeminate-looking gothy guy standing around in a grocery store dressed up like a vampire is one of the least scary things one would have to worry about. I think that kid is one of the lost Chipettes or something. “Uh, mom… eyes on the… eyes on the road, please. Mom? Please stop looking at me and pay attention to driving. Please? Mom? Aw, the fuck with it, there’s nothing in existence that you could possibly crash into anyway.”

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Grrr! I’ll come as a mincing pederast! Er, I mean… a werewolf.” Surprise cameo by Phil Collins in an unbecoming mustache. “I’ve got a stone in my shoe, and her name is Li’l Susy! No, seriously, I got sick of her moral condescension so I used my molecular compression machine to shrink her to a tiny, dense little nugget, then shoved her into my moccasin for safe keeping.” Wait, that’s her name? “Li’l Susy”? That’s how people seriously refer to her? Not just “Susy”, or “Susan”, but “Li’l Susy”. “I’ve got a Stone in my shoe, and his name is Keith Richards.”

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Apparently grandpa’s Phil Ken Sebben. (”Ha-HAH! Costumes!”) And the teacher is Alan Greenspan in drag. Aaaaand the whole thing’s already fallen entirely apart three panels in. See, Jack doesn’t want to teach children to question or disobey authority or to think independently, because then they might do the same with, for instance, their parents or religious leaders. So he has to somehow retain the “MUST obey authority” thing while at the same time allowing Susy to somehow weasel around it and be a Good Christian. Now, what if Ms. Henn ordered Susy to dress specifically like a witch? Or what if Ms. Henn decided to teach evolution? Would she still HAVE TO obey authority, or would Grandpa Nick Fury go to school for some hardcore proselytizing? This seems completely inconsistent with other Tracts, where the characters get all uppity and insubordinate so that they can try to convert authority figures or else end up punished and subsequently feeding their martyr complexes/fetishes. Is that an enormous set of sideways lips on the back of Susy’s head? ‘Cause that really doesn’t look much like hair.

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Not a Halloween costume? She’s obviously never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas. That is clearly the same kid in the first and second panels. Like, every girl we’ve seen so far in this looks nearly exactly the same aside from hair style.

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	How come the Frankenstein’s Monster kid’s mask is the only thing that gets shading in this entire fucking Tract? By the way: In real life, teachers get unreasonably and irrationally mad at kids for their personal preferences! And if a child is afraid of something, the teacher will get angry about it! “They upset me!” Pfft.

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Hah, so… “scary” things… all belong to the devil…? You know, when I was a kid, the things I was afraid of included the Knight Rider theme song and a mattress that my parents were storing for a friend leaning up against the wall at the end of the upstairs hall with a big yellow stain on it. I also had nightmares involving soap opera stars annexing our house for snobby parties, and a plaster cast of my dad’s face from when he was a kid. Do all those belong to Satan as well? As soon as anything becomes scary to someone, does Satan suddenly own it, or is there some kind of generally-agreed-upon level of “scary” that an object needs to possess in order to qualify? How many other kids need to find, for instance, rust on cars scary in order for it to belong to Satan? Or it could just be, as Jack’s children-oriented Tracts tend to ironically throw into sharp relief, that the entire concept is created by humans and driven by human needs — specifically, in this case, the desire to explain all scary things, and have a single attributing source to blame, instead of the origins of “scary things” remaining a mystery, or the result of random influences that are impossible to pin down. The drug store is sixty doors down from EEEEEVIL. Good sweet fuck, what’s up with her head? It’s like Tweety Bird in a wig. I think Jack is trying to ramp up the “adorable” (”but I’s is scaweded of aw dah thcawy ghothtth an’ monthtuwth!”), but he instead drives full-force into the grotesque. “Wait out here a sec, Buffy, I gotta pick up some condoms.”

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“My grandpa explained it to me this way! With total bullshit!” “They believed in something different from us. That makes them evil!” “Nowadays people do know God and they live in even more fear.” Funny how they were, uh, “priests of Satan”, considering their beliefs predated Christianity and Judaism. “Hey, guys, I know! Let’s worship SATAN!” “Who’s that?” “Fuck’d if I know!” “Sounds great! Let’s do it!”

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Bwahaha, wait, what? What? I… okay, for starters, what the fuck is “Saman”? According to Wikipedia, Saman can refer to either: * Luminon / Grand Master Saman from the video game Deus Ex: Invisible War * Saman Khuda who lived in the 8th century and was the ancestor of the Samanid Dynasty, * Saman, a town in the Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province of Iran. * Saman, a novel by Ayu Utami, 1998 * Saman, a very tall tree So the Pagans worshiped… I dunno, the two that would make the most sense are the character from the game Deus Ex: Invisible War, released in 2003, and the guy from the eighth century. Wow, how prescient of them. I think what Jack is trying to say, here, is “Samhain”, but “Samhain” is the Gaelic word for “November”, and refers to the end of harvest celebration. Wait a minute… is Jack Chick getting this from the The Real Ghostbusters cartoon? I mean, the only place I’ve heard of Samhain referring to some kind of personification is Sam Hain, the spirit of Halloween. “Begone from me, giant, beaked sperms!”

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Pfft, WRONG! Wrong, wrong, wrong. Chick’s got to have an anus rivaling Goatse, pulling so much stuff entirely from his ass like this. Hey, Jack: [citation needed] Where, anywhere other than Jack’s ass, is there any record of Celtics sacrificing children on Samhain? I just… just no. No. One hundred percent bullshit. “AAAAAAHHHHH I just tried some of my dad’s aftershave AAAAAAHHHHH!”

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	You know what this is? This is one of those assignments back in grade school English class where you’re given a bunch of objects and told to make up a story about them. Someone told Jack, “Here, here’s a bunch of Halloween icons — make up a story about them,” and this is the result. Jack-o-lanterns as markers of whether a child has been sacrificed by Pagans on Samhain. Goddamn. “Wait, hold on a second, Susy… my tongue somehow just wiggled up into my sinus cavity.”

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	How many dogs and cats, how do they know they were from actual Satanic rituals and not just kids or teenagers parodying Satanic rituals, what actually defines a “Satanic ritual”, where do they find these dead animals, how, aaaand how is this important to the story? Bullshit, by the way, about the missing children. I’m pretty certain this is part of the “Satanic Panic” that took place in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s. (Google for Manhattan Beach McMartin preschool.) Even if it were true that more children were abducted in the days before Halloween, how do you attribute that to “Satanic rituals” and not, say, crazy people who attribute way too much significance to Halloween? Thanks for the “ICE CREAM” label on the side of the freezer, there, Jack. Otherwise, I’d have no idea that that was, in fact, “ICE CREAM” that she was serving her in the cone from inside the freezer.

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	You mean, just as bad as the fictional Satanic-Pagans grandpa Snake Plisskin made up? Yeah, no worries about pederasts or ransom-motivated kidnappers or general psychopaths with ill intentions or anything — the biggest danger for children, as far as abductions go, is witches. Right. Gah, these kids are so spectacularly hideous. Fuckers should be sacrificed just to rid the world of their horrible visages. I like how this Tract kind of takes as a given that little kids should trust their little kid peers to possess authoritative knowledge on, for instance, contemporary theology, as though all the information that Li’l Susy chokes up out of that grubby little mouth of hers is somehow okay to be unquestioningly trusted. “What’s that? The world is full of witches, and little kids get sacrificed by Satanists on Halloween, and Samhain wasn’t November but the Pagan lord of death, and jack-o’-lanterns were used to mark the houses of Celtics who gave their children up to be sacrificed? Wow, how eye-opening! I believe everything you say! After all, you’re the expert!” Even beyond the “little kid” aspect, really: There’s no reason to just automatically assume that Bampy Big Boss’s accounts are trustworthy, either.

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	And I’m glad I don’t give a fuck, so that I don’t end up spending an eternity with little shits like YOU. So the idea is, if witchcraft actually had any kind of tangible effect within reality, if someone used it exclusively for things like curing cancer, ridding the world of AIDS, saving children, doing missionary-style work in third world villages, shit like that… they’d still end up tortured for the rest of time. God only cares, then — and obsessively so — about this one single thought a person could have in their head, regarding whether or not they accept Jesus. Basically, then, what Chick is trying to say, here, is that God is pretty much the last entity we want to use for the arbiter of human morality and our behavior toward each other. Jack’s really fond of the “cracked egg splat” pattern on girls’ clothing, isn’t he? So, they’ve gone to the drug store, the ice cream parlor, and the easel-with-blank-canvas-on-it store. Gee, what exotic locale could be next on their thrill ride of an afternoon?

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	*sigh* Here we go again. It’s time to play… Who’s Jesus!? *theme music* *out trots the smug-assed condescending host* *bring out the spectacularly oblivious contestants* She doesn’t know who he is, yet she knows enough to capitalize the “H” in “He”. This is just… this… this just mocks itself, really. I’m sorry. Moving on…

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“[V]ery real,” huh? How do you quantize “real”? What system of measurement are you using? Are we talking metric “real” or standard “real”? Kid, you don’t even have to ask her to go on. There’s no stopping it. Just sit back, buckle up, and brace yourself against the coming onslaught of nuttery. She knows about God, but somehow not Jesus. Like, you’d think even if she were raised in any other God-oriented religion, just broaching the concept of Jesus, whether they believed in him or not, would’ve been an integral part of the lesson plan, especially if, for instance, you wanted your child to know why you didn’t believe in him, in case the subject came up elsewhere. “Here’s where the old devil comes in.” “God made the devil, too, right?” “Yeah. Anyway, the–” “Well, then, why doesn’t he just stop him?” “What’s that?” “I mean, can God — a truly omnipotent being — make something more powerful than he himself is? If not, why doesn’t he have dominion over it? If so, then shouldn’t the thing he creates be considered the new God?” “I… I don’t… uh… I… I… um. Uh. GRANDPA SAITO!”

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Looks like… a bunch of birds and men and bird-men caught in an inverted tornado? Why “old devil”? What’s with the “old”? Hell, why not “ol’”? We’d have Li’l Susy versus the Ol’ Devil. “Perfect” in that they were complete morons who needed to eat a magic apple just to know what their own bodies were, sure. Or, “perfect” in that they were tricked by a talking snake. I mean, if they were “perfect” then they’d be incapable of fucking things up like that, right? Better yet, if they were “perfect”, then how could the apple have possibly improved their knowledge and understanding of the world?

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“The devil moved in and took over.” Er, so the devil is the one who casts judgment on humans, then, and sends them to hell? So basically, Jack’s Faceless God is really Satan, then. I… guess. Or Satan is more powerful than God, and forces God to send us to hell, because God can’t just do otherwise. Or. I don’t know, trying to make sense out of this or force it all into coherency is making my head hurt. Are people just stopped at the gate like this? I mean, a lot of Chick’s other Tracts have people actually going into heaven and standing before God and then getting tossed down into Hell. Which, well, I guess God actually does allow sin into heaven, but only long enough for people to get damned and tossed over the side. Of course, you have to stay on the runners, or you’ll get sin all over the carpet. “There was nothing we could do to get rid of our sins. I mean, God could’ve just snapped his fingers or something and it’d have been solved. But we couldn’t, and God didn’t. I guess he just likes to torture people.” Hey, how come we can see that girl’s chipmunky little nose from way back here nearly behind her head?

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	No, he was arrested, beaten, and nailed to a cross because Romans were simple-minded fucktards. All the attached symbolism is entirely arbitrary. Man, Satan’s really rocking out, here. I’m picturing him following Jesus all the way up the hill, jamming away on his air guitar… “Hey, Christ, what’s this one? Name this one, okay? Okay… dunnuh-nunnuh-dunnuh-nunnuh dunnuh-nunnuh-dunnuh-nunnuh tootly-tootly tootly-tootly tootly-tootly nyow-nyow-nyowwwww… You got it? Can you guess it? Haha, jackass! It was Thunderhorse. All right, try this one….”

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Little kids proselytizing to each other. Wonderful. I don’t get it, is it really foggy out? Are they taking a steam bath? Are they flying? Are they dead? (Please say dead, please say dead…)

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	The evolution of witches. Oh, come ON. Fuck you, Jack, you self-aggrandizing, self-important tit. Mmmm, kids really go for the generic taste of CANDY candy. So how, exactly, does Halloween pull kids into witchcraft? I guess probably in much the same way as rock music, Harry Potter, houseplants, Dungeons and Dragons, Bewitched, baked beans, and the sun.

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Brainwash ‘em before they can really think for themselves, bribing them with candy. It’s the Christian way! Uh, isn’t the devil already in hell? Be an uptight fuckwad! Never have any fun! It’s the only way into heaven.

Conclusion ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

Gyah, was this one ever painful, somehow even more so than usual. What a bunch of awful shit. Until next time…

Further Reading ⇑ ⇓

Other Reviews & Commentaries ⇑