WI Jack Chick Remains Mainstream?

"Jack Chick" was always "mainstream", at least within his mind and the mind of his followers. Cults always portray the in-group as the saved, chosen, and righteously living. Cults maintain a sharp boundary between cult values and a conception of the "outside world" as corrupt, degraded, or harmful to the cultist. Mainstream is a matter of perspective certainly.

Is "Jack Chick" one artist, a series of artists, a pseudonym? I suspect that the Chick tracts are a multiple person endeavor, given that the illustrations have changed over the years. Perhaps the original Jack Chick has passed on, and a consortium of artists and writers have taken his place. The extreme repetitiveness of his tracts imply that Jack Chick and/or his writers aren't very original or are intentionally repeating the doctrines and attitudes that bind the cult group against outside influences.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Chick tract phenomenon is the now-intrinsic link between "Jack Chick" and his tracts. The two identities are inseperable.
 
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actually, the first Chick books were not anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-everyone else... they were basically little books about living nice Christian lives, being charitable and faithful, etc... I had the idea that they were aimed at people who were already Christian, telling them to stay the course, etc. I ran into these when I was a teen; someone brought a bunch of them to the county fair, and I collected a fair number of them. I ran into them years later, and found that Chick had gone around the bend and was hammering the Catholics, Jews, Muslims, etc....
 
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