Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/10/funnybooks-and-feebs.html
Fundamentalist cartoonist Jack Chick wrote to J. Edgar Hoover in 1971 seeking the FBI’s help with his bizarre religious comics. Today we publish that correspondence in its entirety for the first time, after obtaining it through a Freedom of Information Act request.
I had a neighbor who was a retired Southern judge. I was too little to know, but I’m told he used to sit out on his front porch with a rifle, just waiting for the n*** to come rioting down our little suburban street. There was so much talk in those days the hippies and their allies were out to overthrow the government, which was true of course, but moot since they were pretty much powerless.
Watch what people are saying today. The rhetoric isn’t at that level - yet.
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I am also deeply concerned. where is the revolution? it is high time!
the used phrases are interesting, “fight drugs and witchcraft”, “combat evolution”, “attacks for take-over”. why is everything a war for the conservative types?
In the Azusa - Glendora area we have led over 500 rough drug users to Christ as a result of this work.I miss the actual effect. At a guess: The Azura - Glendora area had 500 Christian rough drug users more.
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Of course Phillip K. Dick also offered his services to the FBI. Maybe they could have become partner agents and fought Commies and Satanists like a demented Scully & Mulder.
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This just goes to show that Hoover had at least some taste.
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I think in a Chick world Hoover’s cross-dressing would have got him stoned, and not with pot.
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His whole schtick was inspired by Chinese communist propaganda. It’s actually something he brags about in one of his tracts.
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Did they add “Appears Mental” in his file like L. Ron Hubbard’s?
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I guess the FBI realized that the vast majority of people who collect and read Chick tracts only do so ironically.
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“No thanks, we are all good on crazy here!”
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Depends who you talk to. I knew some avid conservative media consumers who, when Obama was first elected, were sitting around with their friends talking about* how they were going to buy weapons to “defend themselves” from black people, who were obviously now going to have a revolution (or just mass, violent riots - it was unclear). They were hardly alone in that, because this was the message being sent out on conservative media. Now it’s more about evil immigrants, but it’s still there.
*I assume they actually did it - I cut off all contact, direct and indirect, immediately after.
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[quote=“boingboing, post:1, topic:96724”]Chick, once described in these pages as the “father of the Satanic Panic,”[/quote]As I said at the time: it can hardly be denied that Mr. Chick’s views were questionable, or that Satanic Panic was a thing, but is there really any kind of causal relationship between the two?
But now, of course, there’s a prior reference for this assertion, so it must be true. Journalism!
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I used to have a decent sized collection that got lost in a move. 
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Are you suggesting he was more like the uncle of the Satanic Panic? 
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Definitely the creepy uncle.
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I have discovered a new purpose for my afternoon commute since I sometimes find them on the bus. I will do what I can to help rebuild your collection.
On the condition that from now on you say you lost them in an earthquake, flood, or tornado. “Massive number of Chick tracts destroyed by act of God” makes a much better headline. 
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Jack Chick is certainly good for agnostic hilarity – that is certainly how I initially approached his publications. But let’s be honest, this guy salted the Earth with Christian-themed hate literature and made an unseemly amount of cash doing so. Not funny.
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It’s the little details that make them for me.
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Catholics, Evolutionists, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Free Masons, Mormons.
Man, he didn’t care whose toes he stepped on!
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