Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

Bad boys had mean plans for Betsy's kitty. Will help come in time? A great salvation story for children. Manipulate children into adopting your religious beliefs by making vague implications that their pets’ lives are in danger from Satanists and ne’er-do-wells if they don’t believe in Jesus. Special guest illustration by Charles Schulz……..’s corpse.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Meow at the moon.

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Parents: Be sure to burn all candles and chalk. They are tools of the devil. Oh, come on, Jack - shouldn’t it be Majik Spellz? And I’m certain one or two of the letters should be backwards, especially the ‘e’. This is totally not cutesy enough. “And there were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the… er, I mean… then I guess we’re all set.” Is she gesturing to indicate they need to transition into the next panel in order to see whether they have everything they need, or is that just some kind of palsy?

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Like twenty-sided dice, rock music, consensual sexual intercourse, fossils, critical thinking, and technology, black cats are tools of evil. Burn every one you can find at your next book burning. Knives, too. “The most important part of our ritual is a black cat, and a knife, a knife and a black cat. The two most important parts of our ritual are a black cat, a knife, and ruthless efficiency. Er, the three most important parts of our ritual are a black cat, a knife, and ruthless efficiency. And an almost fanatical devotion to Satan. Our four - no - amongst the most important parts of our ritual are… such elements as… I’ll come in again.”

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	He’s like the bastard child of Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty. Man, there are some sexual allegories going on here I’m not even going to try to touch. “Don’t you want to permanently destroy your cat in order to not achieve any kind of real-world effect at all? What are you, stupid?”

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	I love the reliable duality in all of Chick’s Tracts: Either you believe in Jesus, or you’re the kind of person who’ll stab a kitten to death. Wait a minute, how'd she get the cat away from him? "Good grief! My poor kitty!"

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Gee… now, where have we heard this kind of thinking before? Oh, right, that guy fundamentalists turned out in record numbers to vote for in the last election. Suddenly the kid in the near-copyright-violating wavy-lined shirt has become an angry, middle-aged, soccer-mom dwarf.

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Oh, wow, they’re “In Class”, huh? I’d never have fucking guessed that without the little word block in the top corner. I missed it the first time I read it and thought they were sitting on desks inside a volcano on Venus. Or, like, at a meat processing plant. It was especially hard to figure out because, I mean, it’s not like we’ve ever seen this particular scene layout before. GULP!

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Who’s going to kill her kitty? Jack was right all along - rock music really is evil! So cliché she’s even got an apple on the desk. Hey… hey wait a second! Adults aren’t supposed to be comprehensible to the audience in these! SNIF “Uh, honey… you’re getting snot all over my apple. Thanks.”

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	YOU What a little fucking tattletale. She’s pointing so hard, it’s vibrating the hair on the back of the teacher’s head. And she spills her secrets unbelievably easy, especially given they’re rather disturbing and threatening things, and she’s speaking to the intended victim. “We were thinking of killing a cat in order to do horrible things to you!”

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“But spells don’t work on me, Betsy.” “Why not?” “Well, because spells don’t work in general. I mean, think about it: How many times in your life have you EVER seen ANYTHING that was the result of black magic? And similarly, how many times have you ever seen anything that was the result of prayer? Come on, let’s try both right now and see if we can get any kind of effect at all out of either. Oop, there. Nothing? Thought so. Go save your cat.” Oh, come on. There is no fucking way this girl could be living in the United States and be completely oblivious to the name “Jesus”. Whoa, teacher fall in crude oil between the two panels?

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So if Jesus made the universe, what did God do? I mean, I get the whole “Trinity” thing, but the terminology here doesn’t make any sense. Jesus was Jesus before Jesus was born on Earth? Why did they need Mary? If Jesus is “God the son”, and there’s a “God the father”, then if God the son created and did everything, then what did God the father do? This is just… fucking stupid. Also, wasn’t the Trinity primarily a Catholic thing? I’ve heard fundamentalists argue against the idea of a “triune God” numerous times. It’s a big part of why “Catholics aren’t real Christians” - it’s “worship of Baal”. So what the fuck? She’s gesturing to her left again. Yeah, must be some kind of palsy.

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So you can repel zombie midgets by just sternly telling them “NO!” I guess. Wait - that’s Pigpen! I guess Pigpen wasn’t dirty, he was just visibly manifesting sin all around him. Why doesn’t God just… destroy all sin? He hates it so much that he’s willing to torture everyone who engages in it - which is apparently everyone - for all eternity. If you’re going to be that fascist, you might as well just eliminate free will while you’re at it. It’s much better to control people’s actions their whole lives than it is to fucking torture them forever.

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“God won’t let me in just as I am?” “NO, because God’s love is conditional. See, God is incapable of unconditional love. It’s kind of weird that ordinary people can love each other regardless of what they do, but that God basically hates you unless you choose to believe in him. But I don’t question; love is a human-specific quality. But God is love!” Wait, so if there’s “a much better way” than soap and water to clean yourself of sin, that implies that soap and water is “a way”, just not as efficient. Why does she have a suitcase?

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	*PUNT* “Get the fuck off my cloud!” Hahaha, I love this one. It’s like God is just tossing Jesus down to Earth. Y’know, from his space cloud. The dotted lines are amusing, too. *swatswatswat* “Oh, shit! Bee! There’s a bee following me down!” The fact that people thought (and likely many still think) God lives “up on a cloud” and that Hell is a “hot place underneath the ground” should be evidence enough that the entire idea was conceived when people had no fucking clue at all what was happening outside their range of perception and just created speculative stories about mythical deities and creatures living somewhere beyond the skies and deep down in the Earth where all the stuff that shoots out of volcanoes comes from. “His name is Jesus, and he dances on the sand. I mean… and he taught us how to love and forgive.”

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	So God told God that God would take God’s punishment for sins? Er… what? This is like God saying “okay, well, I’m only fucking omnipotent, so because it’s not like I can just, y’know, outright forgive sins or anything, I’m going to make a physical embodiment of myself, call it my “son”, and then let you torture it to death. That’ll make us even, right?” And the thing is, he didn’t take everyone’s sin on himself, he basically just distilled it all down into a single sin for everyone: disbelief. And that’s apparently the only one he can’t save you from.

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Three days later a miracle happened - Jesus became a Batman action!

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	“Do you want to go to heaven?” “You mean, do I want to spend my eternity with a petty, angry, incompetent, judgmental monster who afflicted me with a vague condition that wasn’t my fault, and is so ineffectual at being omnipotent that he couldn’t just alleviate the condition but instead created this bizarre, contrived process wherein I have to somehow have a very specific way of thinking about Jesus in my head or I’ll burn for eternity? Oh, sure, yeah, sounds like a fucking blast. I totally can’t wait!” And then…

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Ever have that “Not-So-Fresh” feeling? Plug yourself up with Jesus! “I feel so clean! God forgave me! I’m going to heaven! But first, I’m going to go horseback riding and play some tennis!” Wait, why “Later”? And how much “Later”? “Later, after Miss Johnson finished molesting Betsy…” “Three hours later, after an extremely awkward silence…” “Three seconds later, nearly immediately after the last panel, which is what seems to make the most sense in context and renders this text block unnecessary…”

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	They’re playing hand-puppets! Either that, or Miss Johnson has a set of vocal cords in her arm with an additional tracheal passage terminating in her wrist. Try as she might, though, Betsy just can’t get the hang of projecting her voice into her hand. “OH NO! Where’s Fluffy? Gee, maybe if I didn’t stand around for an hour praying with my teacher, I could’ve gotten something done and actually had a tangible effect in the world around me!” I wonder how long that dog has been sitting there, exaggeratedly startled by the presence of an empty cage. Maybe it’s dead and they had it taxidermically preserved.

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Isn’t this the one where they take the masks off after midnight and their faces have been permanently altered to look like the masks they were wearing? Poor kid in the back in the ghost costume got a rock. She has to be dressed like a witch, because if you’re not dressed “the part”, the spell won’t work. Which is why he’s dressed like an angry Ziggy. Pfft. Yeah, kid, God didn’t stop the Holocaust, he’s not stopping the genocide in Darfur, but he’ll save your pwecious widdwe kitty.

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	Hah, they’re just stabbing the cat to death. No rituals or chanting or anything one would associate with stereotypical “black magic” behavior. Fuck, if it were that easy, you’d have pre-psychopathic children (at least, in this imaginary universe where black magic and prayer actually work) running around getting wishes granted left and right. “STOP right there! I wanna know right now: Before you go any further… do you love me?” At least one of these kids is armed, and instead of, oh, say, calling the police or something, she just goes out there by herself with nothing but a flashlight.

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock	She’s squeezing the cat like it’s a tube of toothpaste. Everyone just keeps swinging that poor fucking thing around like it’s a hammer or something. Okay, so these are kids who were willing to kill a fucking kitten to get what they wanted, yet when confronted by the object of their scorn, they back down nearly instantly. “Don’t do witchcraft… Do your HOMEWORK!” “Okay, sorry! Didn’t mean to bring a knife over here and try to stab a kitten to death in your back yard to curse you with the powers of Satan. Our bad…”

Conclusion ⇑ ⇓

Jabberwock

AAAAAUUUUUUUGH! Good grief. I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it…

Further Reading ⇑ ⇓

Other Reviews & Commentaries ⇑