You Don't Know Jack: The Authorized Biography of Christian Cartoonist Jack T Chick

This book is a fascinating, somewhat terrifying glimpse into the minds of two men, Jack Chick and David Daniels, who assisted Chick in his small publishing office, during the last 16 years of Chick’s life. Daniels makes it clear that Chick was his hero and led a nearly stainless life. Both men encountered American Southern Baptist theology, which acted on their brains like snake venom, crippling their development, preventing them from learning anything important from their actual experience. Aside—I’ve always delighted in the incongruity of that nomenclature. There must be thousands of Christian denominations, and nearly the only one that excludes the ritual of baptism in its plan of salvation calls itself “Baptist.”I read this book because it appeared to be my only chance to find out about the mysterious artist behind “Chick Tracts,” odd little comic books meant to save people from Hell. Jack Chick's stark black-and-white designs and his even sharper story lines made for compelling reading and recurring nightmares. Daniels makes less of an impression, but he does manage to reveal a different kind of nightmare in this short, light book. (If you concentrate, you can finish in just over an hour.)Daniels’ fascination with Jack Chick began when a Chick Tract persuaded him to accept Jesus at age 12. He talks about changes in his religious thinking during adulthood, but the development of his writing skill appears to have halted right there; the book reads as though it was written by a 12-year-old. Answers to the questions important to me were never even attempted, such as, “Where and how did Chick study art? Where did his style come from? How did he arrive at his cutthroat Baptist message? Why did this firebrand for the church abstain from attending church for most of his adult life?” If you share my curiosity on these questions, you will find no satisfaction in “You Don’t Know Jack.”The “biography” is insubstantial and disorganized. Near the front of the book, Daniels devotes a section to defending the reputation of Alberto Rivera, a man who claimed to be a former Jesuit priest. Rivera met Chick,—how we are not told—and unloaded wild conspiracy stories about the Catholic church, all of which Chick accepted uncritically and put directly into his comic books, citing Rivera as an authority. Daniels does not tell us Rivera’s importance to Chick’s biography, before launching into minute, trivial evidence for Rivera’s whereabouts in 1955 and reproducing photocopies of documents. Daniels presents a case for Rivera’s personal history that is weak and uninteresting. Rivera almost certainly lied about his background, but that doesn’t matter as much as the complete nonsense he transmited through Chick. Alberto Rivera said the Catholic church was instrumental in the founding of Islam and conspired with Muslims in the attempted assassination of John Paul II. Who cares where Rivera was in 1955? The bigger issue is this: Alberto Rivera was insane, and he’s not the only loony associated with this book.Daniels reveals through family photographs many of the creepy figures that haunt Chick’s drawings. Jack and his first wife, Lola were strikingly handsome when young, but they lived with strange, creepy-looking people who lived desperate lives. One of these was their daughter Carol, who suffered abuse from her husband but was clearly diseased in other ways and died before age 50. Daniels sheds zero light on this mystery by writing:“She had been given chemical cocktails, and was already in a wheelchair. Her body had been destroyed. Jack took her frail body in his arms, back home, and cared for her, and got nurses for her. I can't even tell you what this bad boy was planning to do with her. By the way, Jack was powerless to prosecute that evil man, because he had immunity as an FBI informant. But that's another story.”This is not a passage from a biography, it’s more like the plot of a bad television soap opera. I expected to encounter Vatican spies or space aliens on the next page. Another passage illustrates how far from earthly reality Chick and Daniels hovered:“One day John Todd took Jack aside in private, and told him this: ‘The biggest battle of the end of the 20th century will be the battle for the King James Bible.’ John didn't say, ‘Illuminati.’ He didn't say ‘witchcraft.’ He didn't even say ‘politics’ or ‘one world government’ or ‘one world religion.’ He said, ‘The biggest battle of the end of the 20th century will be the battle for the King James Bible.’ And he was right.”Those of you who lived through this time may recall that our news headlines completely ignored “the biggest battle of the end of the 20th century,” while reporting such non-events as the liberation of Eastern Europe, the rise of the internet and the war in the Balkan states.In conclusion, go ahead and read this book if you’re curious about Jack Chick, as I was. It’s only $6 on Kindle and it’s short. While the book does little to reveal the artist and writer, it provides a disturbing look at the damage theology and hero worship can do to human brains.More delicious quotes:I had been a Chick-tract-reading, King-James-Bible-trusting Christian. But by my second semester in Bible college in the Fall of 1981, I had become a New American Standard reader, who quickly became suspicious of all things Chick. You know how that happened? I trusted men.I stopped handing out any tracts at all. Where I could have passed out thousands upon thousands of Chick gospel tracts to unsaved people, from 1981 through 1998, 17 years, I stopped passing tracts.Wow. So already they are ecumenical. They want Catholic and Protestants together. So I guess they didn't try to get this Jesuit priest saved.So maybe the Ecumenical Movement is really about getting Christians to drop their guard so the Catholics can “dialogue”that's a Jesuit code word for getting others to compromise with Rome. And does it stop there? No. They use spiritual retreats to actually try to turn Christians into Catholics!One of the largest Catholic newspapers, Our Sunday Visitor, then wrote in their next issue that Jack Chick was declaring war on Roman Catholicism. But Jack didn't say, "Roman Catholicism." He said, "The Whore of Babylon." They knew who they were.Jack Chick was a real man. He always worked hard. He tried to do the responsible thing, even before he became a Christian. But he was still an unsaved man. For me to tell this part of the story, you need to know a little more about what Jack was like, by his own admission, before he was saved.So that night on his honeymoon, Sunday night at 8:30 PM, right after the radio broadcast, Jack went into the kitchen and cried out to God to save him.And he did!Then, like an entire story came into his head.

This is a fascinating, heartbreaking must read, with a glimmer of light -- the Gospel being published!! That godly man, Jack Chick, stayed faithful to God and his family throughout heartbreaking challenges. It shows how if God could use him, He can use anyone. And I've always believed Alberto Rivera's story -- now here we finally have all of the additional research about him that I wished I could have seen years ago. Nevertheless, I realized that Revelation 17 in the Bible and history speak for themselves. Wonderful, amazing read!!

This book is a short book written by a very dedicated Christian man, who is serving Jesus and wants the word to go out. He is called "God's comic," because he does tracts from a story-based and comic-strip style. They are all very interesting. He is telling the truth based on the KJV Bible. Look up on Google Jack Chick Publications to order tracts, and look up Jack Chick on YouTube to get many animated tracts plus videos on him and his work. He is dead, now; however, someone else is running the website. By the way, all tracts are researched thoroughly before he puts them out.

My mother was a friend of Jack and she didn't know some of the things about him in this book. She found it a delight to read and I was happy that I could get it for her to stroll down memory lane and remember her friend. She said it was very well written and portrayed him properly.

Jack Chick,vilified by his enemies, was a man on a mission. Fills in the gaps that explain how much dedication it would take to accomplish what he did.I found the book an easy read that was hard to put down once started. An inspiring account of a man who did what he did for humanity and God and Jesus, not for money. Read it and get the background of an interesting life in an interesting way.

Jack T. Chick was a very controversial and very bold man of God. From his miniature cartoon tracts to his full-size comic books he presented the Gospel without flinching. Chick tracts are still widely used to this day. This book is an interesting look into the life of the man and his mission.

What a great time I have had getting to know Jack Chick. It should be the goal of every believer to find the will of God for their life. In this book you will find out that God can use anybody and anybody is you. May the Lord use this book to get you up and going for Him!

The book is a very basic but good biography into the life of one of the most enigmatic figures of American Fundamentalism, whose work is better known than he is. Negatives are there seems to be no organization to the story, and the reader has to wade through several pages of anti-Catholic rhetoric, but it is a landmark book otherwise.