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The natural habitat for a Chick tract was on a bus seat, discarded. Or perhaps splayed out on the Formica of a university cafeteria table beside an unreturned food tray. Though they are no doubt distributed in earnest – and, in the promise of their website, “GET READ!” – they never stayed in the hands of the desperately-in-need-of-saving for very long.

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Jack T. Chick, their creator, may or may not have some claim on being the most widely read cartoonist in the world – dozens if not hundreds of little books, supposedly translated into 100 languages – but he definitely leads the league in cartoons publicly discarded in either amusement or disgust.

Chick, who went to the judgement he was so dearly craving this weekend, at the age of 92, was one of the preeminent fire-and-brimstone evangelicals of his age, an age which has seen no shortage of people railing against our modern Sodom and Gomorrah. His medium was neither the multimedia megachurch of the TV sermon nor the more hands-on humility of the missionary, but the tract: small, black-and-white booklets that plainly explained his proud, pig-headed, paranoid take on Christianity, usually in contrast to the mores of a world that had quite literally gone to Hell, and always ended with a chance for the reader to save their eternal soul by accepting that Jesus is the one true god.