Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults

A Collection of Critical Essays

Michelle Ann Abate, Gwen Athene Tarbox, Michelle Ann Abate, Gwen Athene Tarbox

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496811684
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de cómics y novelas gráficas

With contributions by Eti Berland, Rebecca A. Brown, Christiane Buuck, Joanna C. Davis-McElligatt, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Karly Marie Grice, Mary Beth Hines, Krystal Howard, Aaron Kashtan, Michael L. Kersulov, Catherine Kyle, David E. Low, Anuja Madan, Meghann Meeusen, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, Rebecca Rupert, Cathy Ryan, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Joseph Michael Sommers, Marni Stanley, Gwen Athene Tarbox, Sarah Thaller, Annette Wannamaker, and Lance WeldyOne of the most significant transformations in literature for children and young adults during the last twenty years has been the resurgence of comics. Educators and librarians extol the benefits of comics reading, and increasingly, children's and YA comics and comics hybrids have won major prizes, including the Printz Award and the National Book Award. Despite the popularity and influence of children's and YA graphic novels, the genre has not received adequate scholarly attention. Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults is the first book to offer a critical examination of children's and YA comics. The anthology is divided into five sections, structure and narration; transmedia; pedagogy; gender and sexuality; and identity, that reflect crucial issues and recurring topics in comics scholarship during the twenty-first century. The contributors are likewise drawn from a diverse array of disciplines--English, education, library science, and fine arts. Collectively, they analyze a variety of contemporary comics, including such highly popular series as Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Lumberjanes; Eisner award-winning graphic novels by Gene Luen Yang, Nate Powell, Mariko Tamaki, and Jillian Tamaki; as well as volumes frequently challenged for use in secondary classrooms, such as Raina Telgemeier's Drama and Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

PART FIVE

DRAWING on IDENTITY

HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE

17

Graphically/Ubiquitously Separate: The Sanctified Littering of Jack T. Chick’s Fundy-Queer Comics

Lance Weldy

In Raising Your Kids Right, Michelle Ann Abate writes, “Children’s literature has a long history of didactic education, socialization, and acculturation among boys and girls” (6). She uses The New England Primer as an example of an early American text “explicitly for children” that incorporated “strong messages about faith, family, and civic duty,” as well as basic literacy (6–7). In his introductory chapter to Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists, Edward Babinski defines the fundamentalist religious subculture through a series of questions and answers. Specifically, he notes that “Protestant Christian fundamentalists” believe in “the truthfulness of events recorded in the Bible, morality prescribed in the Bible, and the Christian doctrines derived from the Bible” (21). But how is the fundamentalist to respond to those who do not believe these Christian doctrines or who do not believe them in the same way as fundamentalists? Ernest Pickering, a fundamentalist pastor, claims that “Biblical separation is the implementation of that scriptural teaching which demands repudiation of any conscious or continuing fellowship with those who deny the doctrines of the historic Christian faith” (10). For the fundamentalist child, this separation can become tangible in many forms, including homeschooling or attending a Christian school instead of a public school and refraining from mainstream social activities such as rock concerts.

When it comes to morally didactic comics, Jack T. Chick has made a name for himself by perpetuating fundamentalist (known informally as “fundy” for short) Christian ideology via numerous religious comic tracts and comic books. Whatever their specific literary format, these materials preach about the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible and against a wide range of topics such as abortion, Catholicism, communism, evolution, homosexuality, Islam, and rock music. Chick’s tracts are well-recognized not just because of their polarizing content, but also because of their ubiquity. Robert Ito calls Chick “the world’s most published living author” (56), so it should come as no surprise that Chick Publications provides an annual ordering catalog. As Cynthia Burack has observed about the political rhetoric of the Chick tracts: “For over four decades, millions of believers around the world have evangelized with Chick tracts. In the beginning, the tracts were the product of a social movement that was marginal to mainstream political institutions and leaders” (“From” 178). In her introduction to a special issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly on religion and children’s literature, Jennifer Miskec aptly notes that when authors incorporate theology in texts for children, there is a “potential to be exclusionary” and to receive a “more intense and specific type of critique” (256). Since the very purpose of Chick’s comics is to evangelize and to call on the unsaved to separate from the world, this fundamental, exclusionary element makes these texts even more compelling to scrutinize as they fall into the traditional history of didactic literature for children.

The Queerness of Fundamentalism

To better understand Chick’s ideological background, I want to define Christian “fundamentalism” because it plays an important role in the rhetorical strategy of his tracts. As Catherine Pesso-Miquel and Klaus Stierstorfer note in their Introduction, “The word is also applied to very orthodox religious groups characterized by their intransigence toward any form of heterodoxy, and their hostility to the progressive, secularist influences of modernity, in particular where gender and sexuality are concerned” (vi–vii). For Chick, the literalness of the King James Bible is essential, as is evidenced by his free tract, No Liars in Heaven (2009), which he insists on his website is “a free promotional message to show Christians they need to check their Bible and make sure nothing is missing” (“No Liars”). The aforementioned “hostility” towards progressiveness is also something that this tract addresses, like on page 17,¹ which shows the pastor confused about which Bible to use, surrounded by six people, all clamoring for the pastor’s approval. One of the men says, “Here it is, in today’s language” (17.1). This aversion to progressive mentalities also affects the socio-political arenas as well, as I will point out later through the lens of Abate’s argument about widely recognized tenets of the Christian right movement.

Fundies believe that Christianity is about living a life separated from the world, no matter how strange or queer this decision may seem to the unsaved. In fact, it is this queerness that they believe serves as a rhetorical device by which they can attract the attention and consequently convert nonbelievers. Conversely, Chick berates the notion that Christians should blend in with the unsaved. In his out-of-print tract, Why No Revival? (1986), Chick discusses ways in which Christians do not exhibit Christian behavior and therefore do not win souls for Christ. For example, near the end of the comic, he shows an embarrassed man who alienated everyone in the workplace because of his laughing at “off-color jokes” and flirting. One woman tells another man, “I thought Christians believed in holiness!” (12.1). As Pesso-Miquel and Stierstorfer write, “Fundamentalists feel they belong to a whole, pure community of beliefs, which strictly excludes the (impure) Other, whatever form that Otherness may take. Fundamentalists are against any form of ‘integration’ of otherness” (viii). This “Otherness” takes on any form of “worldliness” in general, which could mean anything from drinking, smoking, or wearing immodest clothing.²

Because of the varied and politically charged meanings of such a word as “queer,” an “intersectional analysis” between Christian fundamentalism and the word “queer” becomes quite useful, especially when focusing on the specific brand of Christianity that prizes a life set apart. In their Introduction to Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Abate and Kidd note: “The word ‘queer,’ which first emerged in English in the sixteenth century, has long meant ‘strange,’ ‘unusual,’ and ‘out of alignment’” (3). Hall and Jagose acknowledge in their introduction to The Routledge Queer Studies Reader the rhizomatic features of queer studies, which includes “intersectional analysis”—“the ways in which various categories of [social] difference inflect and transform each other” (xvi). In combining these two terms, “fundy-queer” connotes the proudly self-proclaimed eschewing of anything mainstream, liberal, or “worldly”—such as attending dances or movie theaters or engaging in premarital sex of any kind—through the rhetorical support of Biblical literalism.

“Fundamentalism,” like “queer,” can be equally politically charged. Scholarship on Christian fundamentalist texts for children, though limited, has given attention to the Left Behind series—by writers like Michelle Ann Abate and Melani McAllister—and to Chick’s fundamentalist comics from contributors like Cynthia Burack and Anastasia Ulanowicz. While this chapter follows in their tradition, my scope differs because I investigate the queerness of Chick’s fundamentalist message, including its dissemination, specifically through a fundy-queer approach that highlights the fundamentalist’s desire to be separate from the world’s negative influences. My unique use of “fundy” itself adds to this tradition. While many fundamentalist outsiders might agree with renowned linguist Roger W. Shuy’s argument that using the -ie suffix, especially about religious denominations, is derogatory (81), I contend for a wider range of connotations. The Oxford English Dictionary neutrally defines “fundie” as “A religious fundamentalist, esp. an evangelical Christian,” and I, as a former fundamentalist, believe “fundy” can serve as a convenient, vernacularized abbreviation without a negative slant. Nevertheless, fundamentalist insiders can perceive “fundy” as humorous and benign, can proudly accept the label as a badge of persecution from and queerness to the world, or can vigorously debate this term as an evangelistic vehicle. Likewise, ex-fundamentalists share a variety of conflicted feelings about this term—nostalgia, indifference, and resentment—all of which can be fueled by reading Darrell Dow’s popular website, Stuff Fundies Like. From an academic perspective, a thorough database search shows that neither abbreviated term (“fundy” or “fundie”) has been used or analyzed in scholarly essays this way before. Despite this lack, “fundy-queer” intends to distance itself from any potentially distracting connotations associated with fundamentalism, while still calling attention to its queerness.

Children themselves are queer, too, especially in how they are situated within the power structure of adults. As Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley note in their anthology introduction, “The authors (ourselves included) use the term queer in its more traditional sense, to indicate a deviation from the ‘normal.’ In this sense the queer child is, generally, both defined by and outside of what is ‘normal’” (x).³ Indeed, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s essay in Bruhm and Hurley’s anthology argues that “the child, from the standpoint of ‘normal’ adults, is always queer: either ‘homosexual’ (an interesting problem in itself) or ‘not-yet-straight,’ merely approaching the official destination of straight couplehood” (“Growing” 283). In light of both of these statements, the fundy-queer child resides not only on the margins of the adult power structure, but also on that of mainstream, progressive ideology. In this essay, I provide a brief overview of Jack Chick before offering a critical examination of his prolific body of comics tracts. This exploration considers Chick tracts primarily through the lens of what Abate identifies in Raising Your Kids Right as the three commonly identified tenets of “postwar American conservatism” (12)—libertarianism, traditionalism, anticommunism/antiterrorism—to demonstrate how Chick’s fundy-queer comics rhetorically indoctrinate children through visual literacy while serving a political purpose by means of categorical religious xenophobia.

Who Is Jack Chick and What Are Chick Tracts?

Ironically, while many people do not recognize the name Jack Chick, he has been called “likely the most widely distributed comics creator in the world” (Orcutt 93). Born on April 13, 1924, Chick’s official biography is posted at Chick.com, where visitors can learn about his irreligious life during high school in California and then his stint in World War II stationed in the Pacific. Upon returning home and getting married, he converted to Christianity after hearing a radio program (“Biography”). In the years that followed, Chick began using his drawing skills to complete his first “soul-winning” tract, A Demon’s Nightmare, in 1962 (Kuersteiner 14). His next tract in 1964 is arguably his most well-known by researchers and mainstream audiences alike: This Was Your Life! The 2014 Chick Publications ordering catalog calls it the “#1 All-Time Best Seller!” with “Over 146 million copies in 100 languages” (Chick Tracts 4). Since then, he has published hundreds of tracts and over twenty full-color comics. Aside from the biographical information given about him on his website, Jack Chick the artist has a rather mysterious, elusive persona. With the exception of one article that appeared in the August/September issue of Chick’s newsletter Battle Cry in 1984, he has refused to be interviewed since 1975 (Chick, Dittmer 281). Even so, researchers like Kurt Kuersteiner and others have been able to piece together a timeline of Chick and his work. Such elusiveness, especially from someone who is simultaneously so ubiquitous, further underscores the queerness of Chick and his separatist rhetoric.

While the Oxford English Dictionary finds instances of the word “tract” as early as the fifteenth century, the third definition of this word is more aligned to how we think of them today: “a short pamphlet on some religious, political, or other topic, suitable for distribution or for purposes of propaganda.” “Tract” falls under the umbrella term “pamphlet,” which, according to Joad Raymond, by the 1580s in England meant “a short, vernacular work, generally printed in quarto format, costing no more than a few pennies, of topical interest or engaged with social, political or ecclesiastical issues” (8). Raymond explains how in early modern printing, “Size influenced status,” meaning pamphlets were considered “less prestigious formats” (5) because of its folding into such a small book. Chick’s tracts follow in this same tradition inasmuch as they are published in a cheap format (16 cents a tract) and folded to such a small size to be given away for evangelical purposes (Chick Tracts 2014).

While Chick’s early tracts were “slightly larger than 5 × 8 inches” (Kuersteiner 14), the format of his tracts soon changed to what they would be easily identified as today: “three-by five-inch, 22-page, staple-bound” (Roth 150). Chick’s tracts contain one to two panels per page, which, in terms of Thierry Groensteen’s theories of page layout, would classify it as having less density: “the variability in the number of panels that make up the page” (44). Moreover, Chick’s tracts would likely fall into Groensteen’s first degree of regularity because each page only contains one strip of panels (43).⁴ Drawing on Benoît Peeters’s use of the term “rhetorical” as a “technique that molds the shape or size of the panel to the action that it encloses,” Groensteen’s first, and less complex, rhetorical group, simple rhetoric, aptly describes Chick tracts (46)—which provide a visual narrative about various topics with the overarching purpose of converting the lost to Christianity—because all are done essentially through the same amount and width of panels throughout the text, with little deviation. In this way, as figures like Laurence Roth and Cynthia Burack have noted, Chick tracts share both formatting features and didactic aims with Tijuana Bibles...