Chance Press

1) It was one of my first tumblr posts and has no notes, despite being an awesome drawing by a legend

(Photo from Lee’s Comics)

I have a story about Chick Tracts. I never realized these were a “thing” until I started going to comics shows and saw Jack Chick exhibiting them, and until I saw how many contemporary cartoonists parody or satirize them. See, aside from Tintin books, Chick Tracts were some of the only comics I read as a kid. Not because I was brought up in a strict Christian house - quite the opposite, in fact.

(For those that aren’t familiar with Chick Tracts, look them up online. They’re these little hate-filled religious pamphlets about how pretty much everything makes you go to hell. The illustrations are designed to disturb and disgust you into piety, and I’m sure there are thousands of adults talking about these in therapy nowadays.)

When I was in junior high, I played in a regional orchestra that met every week in a community center. There was this kid named Paul who played percussion, and during our breaks, he heckled the guys who played in the adult basketball league that played games in the community center’s gymnasium. I thought he was hilarious. He was homeschooled, and his dad wore a plastic American flag tie to our orchestra concerts.

I didn’t realize that Paul was a religious kid - I just thought he was funny, and I thought being homeschooled must be amazing. After a while, he started giving me Chick Tracts, but he always did it on the sly - thinking back, this was probably because he had gotten in trouble in the past for distributing religious material to people who didn’t want it. He told me they were about the devil, and my first thought was, “Cool! Satanic comics!” I remember one about a rock band that sells their soul to Satan for a record contract, but I guess I was too dense to pick up on the message, because the parts depicting the band fornicating with groupies and doing drugs seemed really cool and outrageous. The religious stuff just kind of got in the way - and I figured that my parents wouldn’t want me to have a bunch of comics with rock starts fucking groupies and shooting up, so I stuffed them in my sock drawer underneath the dress socks I barely ever wore.

I told Paul that I liked the rock n’ roll one, and he explained that if you read them closely, you could learn how to fight back against Satan’s temptations. This blew my mind - reading Tintin, I had a keen sense of how one set of characters can form the center of an entire narrative universe, and so I imagined this badass rock band signing a contract with Satan and then fighting back against him while doing drugs and having sex, and it all just seemed so over-the-top and illicit that when he gave me a handful of new Chick Tracts, I stuffed them into the sock drawer with the first one, planning to read them all in a row the next time I was home alone.

A couple days later, my mom and dad sat me down and had a conversation about the hidden comics they had found in my drawer. The hilarious part of this conversation is that in both tone as well as my level of nervousness and shame, the conversation mirrored every conversation a parent has ever had with a child about found porno magazines, baggies of weed, etc. That these were religious comics designed to teach you how to live a righteous, pious life didn’t matter at all. Part of this is that, in a lot of ways, I had “cool” parents - they weren’t hippies or anything and would ground my brothers and I for minor offenses, but (aside from the cultural aspects of Judaism), they were very sensitive about religious messaging. My dad, especially, freaked out and kept hammering on me, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT THESE ARE ABOUT? THESE ARE FOR JESUS FREAKS! WHO GAVE THESE TO YOU?! HOW CAN YOU READ THIS SHIT?!!!”

Simon Roussin

Sur son illustration : Strasbourg, terrain de jeu d'étudiants marginaux en devenir, est le décor d'un teen movie sentimental teinté de fantastique.

Simon Roussin, diplômé des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg en 2011, est l'auteur de Robin Hood (l'employé du moi), Lemon Jefferson et la grande aventure, Heartbreak Valley (2024), Les Aventuriers, Le bandit au colt d'or et Ciné-club (Magnani), et Barthélemy l'enfant sans âge (Cornélius). Co-fondateur de la revue Nyctalope avec Marion Fayolle et Matthias Malingrëy, il a aussi publié des livres et affiches en sérigraphie en hommage à ses héros de cinéma, Belmondo, Steve McQueen et Jean Seberg en tête.