Bible prophecy. The devil is worried, because he knows something is up! What could it be?

You know, I really, really, really hate to say this, and the implications are a little unnerving, but I actually sort of like a lot of the artwork in this one, overall. It’s kind of a remarkable improvement over his last few. The Tract still sucks, though, and is the same level of crazy we’ve come to expect.

The doctor always feels awful about delivering bad news, so he’s worked out a Señor Wences routine where he tells them with a hand puppet. Really lightens the mood. “He’s gone.” “Oh, no! (Sob! Sob!)” “Aww, don’t worry! *taps body* S’alright?” (Throwing voice into body:) “S’alriiiiight.”

“HOMPH GLOMPH SOB WELL AT LEAST I GET TO EAT THE REST OF HIS HOSPITAL PUDDING GLOMPH SOB GLUMF MMPH SOB”

Chick really seems to have a thing for drawing people and monsters with enormous dildoes coming out of their heads. Though, say what you will, this guy’s downright charming compared to most of the — well, basically anything usually depicted in a Chick Tract, other than Fang.

Why couldn’t Pastor Weber have just prayed to Jesus to help ease his worries? I thought that’s part of what came with the whole “personal relationship with Christ” thing.

Is this guy… some kind of… goth poultry? Oh, I see, he’s Demon Big Bird.

I think I’ve figured it out: Jack really hasn’t had any conversations or personal interactions with any other human beings. It explains his bafflingly unrealistic dialog, and also sheds some light on why he seems to place emphasis on words almost entirely at random. He hasn’t spoken aloud with another person for so long that he can’t even remember what speech is like.

“Go sit with the body! I’m going to lick my shoulder for a while until I can figure out what it tastes like.”

“Talk like that is dangerous.” Why? They’re already in hell. There are certain boundaries of torment beyond which any addition to quantity or intensity no longer matters. For instance: “If you keep talking like that, the boss is gonna put twice as many peppered centipedes up your urethra!” I mean, after one or two, it really doesn’t matter much anymore.

“Yes, I — I, the prince of darkness, king of all evil, master of misery, dominus of death, I who could fashion a new world of illusion and trickery to destroy all of mankind, I who am practically a god, in fact the greatest foe of God himself — really, really give an absolutely enormous shit that you were a faithful person. Because this is important, see. All of human endeavor, all of creation… at the top of it all, the Big Picture, more important than anything else, the very meaning of life itself, is this big fuckin’ childish game of Collect the Soul. This is the purpose of EVERYthing. And you helped to defeat me by staying faithful! I hated you for that. Your believing in God caused me SO MUCH TROUBLE because it’s all just SO IMPORTANT.”

Pastor Weber’s family opted for the unfinished coffin, thinking the unstained wood would serve as a metaphor for the pastor’s plain, ungarnished life. They didn’t find out until too late that by “unfinished”, the manufacturers meant “exposed in some places due to a missing piece of wood at the top of the cover”.

I dunno, this guy’s already pretty messed up. Any further “messing” would be kind of a lateral move, really.

He seems bored and apathetic and lazy, but can you really blame him? Thousands of years of this “it’s your job to pester people incessantly” crap would bore the shit out of anyone. Except apparently God and Satan. Think about it: Your job is to go up and, like, I dunno, whisper at people that they should believe in but dislike Jesus, get abortions, enjoy intercourse with people who have genitals that are the same as theirs, etc, for no discernible reason. Angels have a much better time ’cause they get to trip people, but I’m sure that all gets pretty old pretty rapidly as well.

Shit, why not just give up? I mean, what are these guys getting out of all of this, anyway? Is there a 401k plan or something? What bearing does the soul game have on their lives? Just seems like ultimately a lot more work for no real benefit, to me.

Of course, I have no idea who the fuck any of them are and why they’d be attending this guy’s funeral, seeing as they’re offended by any mention of even the tamest of Christian beliefs. I think Jack’s a little confused, here. When people get offended by religion, they’re typically not offended by the whole “Jesus died for your sins, believe in him” bit, they’re offended by all the “fags are an abomination” and “women should be subservient to men” and “aborting a wad of cells is equivalent to murder” bullshit. It’s like wearing a t-shirt that says “N**gers Go Home” while reading aloud from a Robert Frost collection, and then getting all indignant about people not liking Robert Frost. Come on, Jack, are you really THAT fucking dense? Can you not see the distinction?

Nah, Thelma’s too busy retrieving the emergency ham reserve she keeps tucked into one of the fleshy pockets of her flabby cheeks to notice.

SNORT SNORFLE DEAR GOD I JUST REALIZED I HAVEN’T EATEN ANYTHING IN OVER AN HOUR SNORK HLORK

Show of hands: How many of you have ever been sitting there minding your own business when a voice in your ear from an invisible source tells you that someone has entered the room? Okay, now, all zero of you who answered positively to that question, was your response to this “Who?” as though you were having a telepathic dialog with this voice? And did you actually receive an answer? Just… I don’t… gyah. Though, it really wouldn’t surprise me for a fundamentalist to assert that they actually heard voices. In fact, that would probably explain quite a bit.

Oh, and by the way, heaven fuckin’ forbid a person be attracted in any way to someone other than their spouse. “BETTER NOT LOOK AT ANOTHER WOMAN OR YOUR PORCINE WIFE WILL CHOP YOUR DICK OFF AGAIN”

Meanwhile, giant sperm rocket down to the earth like tiny meteors.

“It could happen TONIGHT. Like, seriously, you guys, it could totally just HAPPEN at ANY MOMENT. I know we’ve been saying this for decades, centuries, even, possibly even millennia, but this time, we’re TOTALLY SERIOUS. God created the entire world just so that he could play some idiotic soul game and then suddenly destroy everything to cash in his chips, sentencing almost all of his creation to unfair and infinite misery. I. AM. SO. SERIOUS.”

Poor guy is still spitting through the hole a little from where he’d changed his mind about the Monroe piercing.

Yish. Okay, these people have gone back to being just plain hideous, now. You could put this woman’s head on a stick and use it to chop wood.

“Being a near-omnipotent quasi-deity that God — a truly omnipotent being — is apparently incapable of just wiping out, it’s completely understandable that there would be something that I — again, prince of darkness, God’s biggest adversary, just unfathomably powerful — wouldn’t know about the end times that some random preacher would, by virtue of nothing more than just believing in Jesus. Why, that makes perfect sense!”

Listen, dummy!

Aw, and Jack had been doing so well, too. There had actually been some backgrounds until now. Now it’s the Graveyard on the Edge of Forever or something.

“Here lies Pastor Weber | I’ll thank you not to drag your BUTT on my GRAVE!”

Fang! I had a feeling he’d be making an appearance in this one.

I guess what Jack is implying, here, with all this “nobody believes that” stuff is that everyone should always believe in and take precautions against everything unobservable and threatening, because you never know.

“Blast it! I could be here for centuries! And where am I supposed to go to the bathroo — *scoots back, defecates* never mind, found a spot.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring me some Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs albums.”

It’s either record-breakingly foggy down there, or the town is surrounded by a thick veil of marshmallow. Oh, or else Jack forgot to fill in a background again. I mean, we KNOW he can do it — he did it up to the page before this one.

Okay, it’s cute from the side, but from the front, it looks like the dessicated corpse of Peter Lorre was rolled through some honey and dog hair or something.

Right: Nobody talks about the end of the world unless it’s, like, on the absolute verge of happening, or anything. It must be imminent if there’s a conference about it.

I wonder how many people prior to World War I believed it described the first world war. Or how many people prior to World War II thought it described the second. I mean, if there’s a World War III, and none of these things take place, will they all change their minds and say it describes World War IV, or will they finally just fucking give it up already? The Bible also says that “nobody will know the time or the place”.

Just so we’re clear: God will somehow go out of his way to magically protect the Jews in Israel, but he won’t let them into heaven because they don’t believe in Jesus. And I guess he only gives a shit when people attack the Jews on a massive scale in Israel and not, y’know, say, Germany.

“I ain’t give no shit ’bout none-a them furrin places. Whuh’bout Amurrica?”

Gee, why could there have been no mention of the United States in the Bible, which was written two thousand years ago, over a century before Europe became aware that the Earth was not, in fact, flat and that there were other land masses to the west? Wow, what a tough fucking question. Gee, why could that possibly be?

The guy in the crowd and the demon a few panels back should have an argument. “No, no, no!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

HOO BOO NATIONALISM. You know, half the dialog in this thing seems to rely on people attending events with topics of discussion they vehemently disagree with.

Again, Jack, if you put on a hat that says “Jesus” and walk around trying to oppress everyone around you and be a general dickhead, only to find that you’re pissing a lot of people off, it’s not the word “Jesus” that they’re getting upset about, it’s all the fascist shit you’re doing in the name of Jesus that’s doing it.

Any God who punishes people infinitely for any action — even the most sinister thing a person could do to another person — simply cannot be considered the arbiter of morality. It just doesn’t work. And what the fuck do the Ten Commandments matter if, as Jack so frequently points out, a person’s actions and works don’t matter? What, so God says “all you need to do is believe” and then he gets all pissed off that people aren’t enforcing the Ten Commandments — which are all arbitrary and victimless, mostly thought crime, and partially just a big ol’ handjob for a petty, childish, self-centered and jealous God — at the barrel of a gun?

Nobody wants to “kill the gospel”, we just want to keep it the fuck out of government.

Considering most of the contemporary U.S. leadership — particularly conservatives — seems to hate the U.N., one would think that would put us back on God’s side, in an “enemy of my enemy” kind of way.

You know, come to think of it, if that’s how it all ends, with everyone either in heaven or hell, it’s all a losing scenario. There’s no way I can see an infinite span of time without change or challenge as anything but hell. It wouldn’t really matter if I were getting near-molten ball bearings shoved up my anus one at a time or not, after a while. Eventually, it just becomes the status quo, and the status quo itself becomes the hell.

Looks like Frankenstein’s monster is attending this conference. Maybe he gives a talk later on in the conference where he describes another way that “death isn’t the end”.

So is the devil just stupid, or…? I mean, does he not notice the “before God’s judgment hits” part, or something? Like a futile little romp on Earth between the rapture and the total end of the world is going to really have much of a point.

Hey, it’s Paul Simon!

“Wind!” “Water!” “Fire!” “Earth!” “Heart!” “We are CAPTAIN PLANET!”

And then…

Now, wait just a damn minute. In so many of Jack’s other Tracts, he claims that the rapture will come only after the Antichrist ushers in an era of worldwide peace. So why would there be Islamic fundamentalists beheading U.S. soldiers?

Really fucking convenient, too: This is the same kind of synchronicity as The Last Generation, where — purely coincidentally — the rapture happens just as the villains show up to capture and kill the “protagonists”.

Here’s something I don’t get: Apparently the living will be taken bodily to heaven, but is it the same for the people who are already dead? Do their corpses pop up and meet everyone “up in the air” with Jesus, or just their souls? And why the difference?

I’m no expert on Middle Eastern fashions, but I’m pretty certain Jack has the clothing all wrong, here. By the way, “Allahu Akbar” is a shorter way of saying “Allahu Akbar min kulli shay”, which means, in Arabic, “God is greater than everything.” Because, y’know, “Allah” is the Arabic word for “God”. But Jack’s a moron.

People should do this with campfire horror stories. “And then the killer left a hook hanging from the rear view mirror! And if you’re not careful, then he’ll get YOU, too!” “We’re afraid! We don’t want to be killed by The Hook!” “Then here’s what you must do: Eat a fistful of raw hamburger, fart onto a quarter, then say the name of your most recently-deceased relative backwards three times while masturbating.”

And they say it’s not a religion of fear. Pfft.

This guy could meet everyone “up in the air with the Lord” as well — all he’d have to do is catch an updraft with those parachute-like ears of his. Which makes me wonder: Can people cheat and buy jet packs?

Ah, okay, so you don’t actually have to believe in Jesus, you just have to be on him somehow, and just generally believe in anything.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” “No, no, no!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

Yeah, don’t look at the next page. Text is so small, you can barely even read the fucking thing anyway. (I never include it because it’s the same thing every time, and there are only so many jokes you can make about centurions.) If you really want to, though, you’re welcome to click here.

I’ve been thinking about Jack’s distribution techniques of late. I always feel like Jack has the upper hand in that he has all these printed materials for people to hand out. Whenever I go through the Times Square subway station and see the huge shrine to all the Chickanery, I’m sort of at a loss — I could stand there shouting like some moron nutcase, I suppose, or intercepting everyone they talk to who seems to have a serious interest to try to talk them out of subscribing to this nutty, oppressive, invasive bullshit, but that would be more than a little retarded, and even worse than what the Chickites are doing.

So, I’m considering making printable versions of these Dissections, shortened a little and with smaller text, that can easily be printed, cut out, and inserted into the Tracts themselves. People could print them out whenever they encounter a Chick Tract somewhere, take out the staple, slip the print-outs between the pages, staple it back together, then go and leave it somewhere random, in turn. Though, I’m not sure if anyone would really be interested in that kind of thing.

Anyway, until next time, everyone.