I‘m feeling a bit poorly today, so in lieu of an actual post, here’s an old comic I found on a blog called Grottu. I’m pretty sure this is what our old friend NWOslave sees when he looks at the world.
Slightly more on topic, here’s a frame from an old romance comic; you can find a discussion of the somewhat, er, problematic story it’s from on Sequential Crush.
The triple exclamation marks were Al Hartley’s trademark.
I’m reminded of that scene from Dune where Chani asks Paul to tell her about the waters of his homeworld, where they have wonders like rain and rivers.
Ooh! pdf versions of some Spire Christian Comics classics!
http://www.carpsplace.com/spire/spire.htm
Hey guys–I’ve got a complete collection of Chick’s Crusaders comics (they’re proper color comic books that pretend to have an actual plot) that I’ve been meaning to riff sometime. Anyone want to help? We could do it on chat or in the forums.
This sort of thing always reminds me of Huck Finn.
@tbw: you ever read Fred Clark?
Sounds like fun!
Aw, geez. My dad has huge collection of those comic books. All us kids used to read them when we were little (sadly, the fact that they now have torn pages and cookie smudges probably lowers any value they have…certainly, they have no artistic value…). There were also a bunch of comic books with superhero missionaries. I always liked the “Bible Smuggler” comic books, with the missionary who would bring bibles into communist countries. I thought it was so cool how good would “blind the eyes” of the godless communists that searched his trunk, and they would totally miss all the stacks of bibles and let him move on.
Well, until I turned eleven, or so. Then I realized some of the major flaws in their logic. (“Uh, Daddy? Couldn’t the guards have been Christians, too, and that’s why they let him go through? Or maybe it was near the end of their shift and they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork? Or what if he slipped them a twenty at the gate?” *cue lecture on communists and how every single communist was completely devoted to destroying God and only God’s supernatural powers could have protected The Bible Smuggler.*)
I love fundamentalist morality. Smuggling is bad! But if you do it for Jesus then it’s good! Also, if you want to convert people all you need to do is have them read the Bible! The fact that this doesn’t seem to be working very well in many parts of the world does not in any way indicate that the basic idea is unsound, it’s just that Satan has taken over the European Union.
Invented Hinduism? Did the Catholic Church have a time machine or something?
Smuggling is bad!
I read that as “snuggling”, then I had a sad.
Guys, guys! I need help thinking of a Christmas project my daughter and I can do. It needs to be something decorative. Any ideas?
pillowinhell, how about wreaths or ornaments? Since my husband’s family is so gigantic, every year we have a craft contest. Last years was make a wreath using found/recycled objects, the year before was make a Christmas tree out of something organic (we won that year), and three years ago was make an ornament for someone who’s name you picked. For that one, I used plain glass ornaments, paint, and other stuff to make a Very Vegas ornament for my SIL who loves that place.
Actually, Cassandra, Jack Chick’s fundamentalist mentality is more like you can be as bad as you want to be, whether you’re a liar, a thief, hell, child abusers have been shown to be OK, just as long as you accept Jesus. Meanwhile, you could be doing charity work, ending world hunger, disease, or anything bad in the world, but if you’re not shoving religion down their throats, you’re doing a bad thing.
I believe the Papal Time Machine is how the Pope went back in time to kill Jesus.
At my old church, a lot of the families would spend Halloween in prayer. And then they gave out Chick Tracks to the kids instead of candy.
My parents were not that crazy. We were allowed to go Trick-or-Treating (and, boy, did we get crap for that at church), as long as we didn’t dress up as witches, the Devil, or demons. Because witches and demons are real, you see, and Mom didn’t want us making light of or imitating evil. And, of course, we couldn’t watch scary movies that contained witches or devils or black magic or anything like that. (Yeah, Sabrina the Teenage Witch was off-limits. So was Scooby-Doo. Although we did get to watch some Disney movies, which again, marked us as Not Quite Good Enough at church.) So, still a little crazy, just not as crazy.
Why is Scooby Doo un-Christian? Is it because the dog talks?
Cthulhu’s Intern – that sounds like some Assembly of God people I worked with back in the 80s. One of them said “Mahatma Gandhi was a Satanic figure” to me one day. My mind still boggles thinking about that. The only good thing I can think of him saying regarding religion or beliefs was “Of course animals have souls!” which is a step up from the animals-are-soulless-machines creeps.
@CassandraSays
As I kid I believed it was because there were ghosts and goblins and magic and all that stuff we weren’t allowed to watch. Didn’t want us getting seduced by the supernatural, and all that.
Now that I’m an adult and I’ve actually seen episodes of Scooby-Doo…maybe they just didn’t want us watching a program that showed if you actually looked beneath the mask (to quote Tim Minchin) there was always a logical explanation, no magic need apply? That’s a much more dangerous idea for a religious kid than anything witchy.
(Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s because my mom had no more idea what Scooby-Doo was about than I did. She probably just saw the commercials and put it in the “forbidden” category…or someone else told her it was bad, I dunno. I mean, we didn’t watch a lot of TV, to be honest. I couldn’t watch Rugrats because she felt the kids were disrespectful to their parents. It made it a little difficult to relate to kids my own age outside of church. Even now, I have some serious pop-culture gaps. I honestly don’t get a lot of the references people make. I love how Nick is running all the old shows from back when I was a kid, like Clarissa and Doug and All That…I feel like I can catch up, get a little taste of what I missed back then.)
I mean, I know it’s full of “vampires” and stuff, but they always turn out to be some guy in a costume, and the kids always save the day. It’s just so wholesome and harmless.
Maybe part of the problem is that Daphne and Velma are in short skirts and not helpless?
Re: Scooby Doo. Maybe it’s because everyone is constantly stoned?
Indeed. Like it’s the Necronomicon or something. Scary, really.
And in some Chick Tracts, Chick Tracts themselves have the same effect! I guess Pride isn’t a sin if you’re the right kind of Christian.
Speaking of pride, I just watched a documentary about the Phelps family. That’s some ego that Grandpa Phelps has, and apparently he passed every bit of it on to his daughter Shirley.
Re: Scooby Doo – I think that Christians might be on the right track here. Scrappy Doo is clearly the spawn of Lucifer.
CassandraSays: I’ve heard, though, that the Phelps family is actually just a group of con artists posing as religious fundamentalists. You see, they’re all lawyers, so they intentionally piss everyone off, wait for someone to cross the line, then they sue. There’s some circumstantial evidence for it, just look at them protesting. They’re all just calm and collected, even when there’s people shouting at them. Another thing: Back in the 60s, Fred Phelps was very active in the civil rights movement, and was given awards by the NAACP, and has donated a lot of money to the Democratic party.