I finally did it. I found a Chick tract in the wild.

Chick tracts, for the uninitiated, are small illustrated religious pamphlets originally created by one Jack T. Chick, who hoped that his comics would convert America’s populous to fundamentalist Christianity. Despite the downright hateful views expressed in some of these booklets and the controversy they still attract, they continue to be distributed by various means across the globe, carrying Chick’s messages beyond the grave (he passed in 2016). They have become a frequent target of lampooning by those infatuated and infuriated by their existence; they have been immortalized in films, CD booklets, and songs.

I have always found these tracts fascinating for their sheer lack of subtlety in their messaging as well as their iconic and immediately recognizable graphic style, which has inspired many a budding punk graphic artiste hoping to subvert the Mainstream. To me they serve as fascinating, living artifacts from America’s fundamentalist side, just one example of the persisting influence of the religious right in the west and beyond.

“The Word Became Flesh” is not as interesting as some of the other, more well known tracts—instead of an absurd cartoon story of a lost soul/dirty rotten sinner being miraculously converted to the Lord after a short conversation with another cardboard cutout of a person, it’s an illustrated retelling of portions of the Bible regarding Jesus’s word. But that doesn’t make it any less intriguing.

Actually, my first encounter with a Chick tract was in the wild, though it wasn’t as a found object. I was casually browsing the pants aisle of a local thrift shop hoping to find something tolerable in my size when a mysterious woman armed with a shopping cart manifested beside me. With long pale wavy hair and dark, flowing garments, she resembled one’s kooky, Wicca enthused aunt who always bakes a mean batch of cookies when you visit her every summer. However, her religious affiliation vastly differed from what her outer appearance implied, which I would soon learn.

She was feuding with an overwhelming armful of clothing hangers which she eventually lost control of, dropping the collection on the ground in the process. I naturally glanced over, expecting her to be bending down cleaning up her spill. Instead, she just stood there, looking somewhat bewildered. She may have been old, but she didn’t look so frail that she wouldn’t be able to pick up the mess. It was almost as if she had committed the act on purpose as a test of my will to help a poor old disheveled woman experiencing obviously monumental peril. Concerned but willing, I bent down and began to help pick the hangers up for her, placing them in her cart.

She thanked me for my help and asked me a few questions, with the most potent question being, “Do you attend church?” The moment my brain processed the inquiry, I knew something was different. I replied that I do not, as I would be lying if I said otherwise.

She made her exit by gifting me a “comic book” from her bag, immediately recognizable to me from it’s horizontal format and monochrome cover. Next to a crudely drawn image of a wailing nuclear family with “666” imprinted on each member’s forehead, bold white text spelled out “The Beast;” “J.T.C.” lingered in smaller print in the lower right corner. Baby’s first Chick tract.

Upon realizing what gold I was currently holding, I slipped it into my back pocket as discreetly as possible as feelings of unreality and ecstasy began to boil within my brain. There was no way I would ever have such a seemingly once-in-a-lifetime encounter—right?

But it was real.

Since then, I’ve found numerous religious pamphlets while shopping at Christian-run thrift stores in my area, usually lying on a table of goods or a bookshelf, including this amusing vandalized item. However, none of these had been a Chick Publications product, and all of them were much more generic. There’s something about the cartoony malice of a Chick tract that still holds, a blatant propaganda tool turned cultural icon.