Reviews for Modern Masters, Volume 13: Jerry Ordway

The average rating for Modern Masters, Volume 13: Jerry Ordway based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-06 00:00:00 Desmond Smith If you grew up in Baptist circles, you likely grew up with Chick Tracts, those hundreds of different 22-page comic booklets that reduce all of Christendom to hell avoidance. Author Kurt Kuersteiner is hands down the foremost authority on the late Jack Chick (who died in 2016 at the age of 92). Chick spent his life building the most influential underground comic series of all time, printing over 800 million tracts in over 100 languages. Each tract is a stand-alone story that rallied for various fundamentalist pet topics such as exposing the evils of evolution, catholicism, homosexuality, and satanism (Halloween, Harry Potter, TV shows like Bewitched, etc.), and each concludes with a call for the reader to recite the sinner's prayer. The "Art of Jack T. Chick" is an oversized book with lots of small print so it took me quite a while to get through it all. It includes: - LOTS of chick artwork - Reasons to collect chick tracts - Summaries of every tract along with estimated collector values - Backstories of the scammers in Jack's life with their strange evangelical conspiracy theories that deeply influenced Jack's comics - The author's backstage tour of Chick Publications (where Kuersteiner was like a kid in a candy shop) Jack Chick was apparently a very gentle and private man, and only a handful of Jack photographs exist. But Jack's defining feature was his total obsession with hell. By promoting hell to be the central message, it becomes an infinity in the Christianity equation, canceling out all the other terms. Such an end can justify any and all means. The Inquisitions publicly burned people alive, demonstrating their belief in hell to onlookers, and by it, the authority that they and God wielded. The clear, but unspoken message is that you can forget about love and truth, it's might that makes right, so get with the program. In Chick's comics, hell takes the theological center stage, granting Chick the authority to press his various theological positions and social commentaries as he goes about his evangelizing. Jack was distressed when he didn't receive hate mail, since that implied he was doing something wrong, for "Christ didn't come to bring peace, but a sword" (p161). Through television and movies, audiences have become desensitized to horrific imagery over the last 40 years. But from reading posts online, it's clear that these comics left a lasting impression on Generation X/Y Baptist kids during their formative years. Here's an example from a 90s tract "No Fear?": Sometimes at the final judgement, the comics show the damned pleading their case, but God simply tells the person that they threw away the Chick Tract that could have saved them. In "SCREAM!" (2002), the comic shows a person burning alive but miraculously survives. In the burn ward, a friend describes how much worse the hell that Jesus created (John 1:3) could be for him. The tract ends with a warning to the reader: "You've read the story. You can't squirm out of this. You've got no excuse now!". Anyway, Kuersteiner has clearly dedicated a large portion of his life to the study of Chick and sharing his love for collecting the comics. This book is a reasonable purchase for those who want to revisit their childhood indoctrination with adult understanding, or for those who have randomly encountered Chick tracts in public transportation, bathrooms, hospitals, etc. and are just curious to learn more.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-28 00:00:00 Jontor Wae A wonderfuk book about the evangelist cartoonist,