Jack Chick, a fundamentalist evangelical cartoonist who repeatedly offended the Catholic church, secular society, Muslims, Jews, ethnic minorities, gay people and others he perceived as sources of evil, has died at the age of 92.

The reclusive California-based artist passed away on Sunday, according to Chick Publications. “Brother Jack Chick passed away Sunday evening, October 23, peacefully in his sleep. He was 92. He will be interred in a small private ceremony,” said a Facebook post.



It added: “Our promise to you – Nothing changes: The Method The Vision The Purpose.”



There was mixed reaction on social media to his death, with some mourning the loss of a man who “helped bring salvation to thousands and thousands” and who “stood for the truth and was biblically sound in the literature that he printed and/or distributed”.



Others decried his cartoon tracts as “crude, false and damnable” and “using bewilderingly inane and deplorably bad arguments in an attempt to convince ignorant bigots to adopt his form of mindless reactionary religious extremism”.



A cartoon by Jack Chick. Photograph: www.chick.com

Since publishing his first cartoon book in 1961 with an $800 loan from a credit union, Chick produced several hundred comic strip tracts, sometimes known as Chicklets.



Chick Publications, was established in 1970, claims to have sold more than 750m copies of the tracts in more than 100 languages.



Chick himself was a recluse and, according to some, paranoid character who reportedly found God while listening to an episode of the radio show The Old-Fashioned Revival Hour.



Some people regarded his work as folk art, and the small cartoon booklets became collectors’ items.



The Catholic church was one of his chief targets, which he referred to as “the great whore”. In one cartoon, Jesus tells a Catholic character that “false teachings are why you are going to the lake of fire”.



A post headlined The Nightmare World of Jack T Chick on Catholic Answers described Chick’s work as “a world of shadow and intrigue, a world of paranoia and conspiracy theories, a world where demons haunt people sincerely trying to follow God, and the Catholic faith is the devil’s greatest plot against mankind”.



Chick also denounced rock music and Harry Potter as inspired by the devil.

