You thought this was going to be about scantily-clad women, didn't you?

Well, no. It's about Chick Publications, a fundamentalist Christian publisher (via Alex Knapp).

It's Sunday, so in lieu of Church services, I thought I'd point you to the newest Jack Chick tract that Knapp links to, in which you can learn all about how Satan invented the Catholic Church (I am not shitting you...go read the comic).

Also, I was wandering around their site and found a place to buy Primal Man, a creationist comic book in which a hapless professor sees the light, realizing that evolution is "one of the cruelest hoaxes ever invented"!

Now, the thing is, I actually had this comic when I was a kid. I think I bought it because I thought the cover was cool (and it actually kinda was). I do believe that Primal Man and a Watchtower book I found in my local public library gave me my first inklings of what propaganda was.

It was one of those important disillusioning thresholds that are necessary to cross at times. Until then, I thought that books carried a huge amount of authority and prominence. I'm not sure even at the age of 11 or 12 that I still thought everything in books was true, but it still hadn't dawned on me that some people would willingly try to subvert the truth through entire books. By that time I'd seen the occasional typo or misstated fact, but not an entire book bent on contradicting stuff I was reading in nature and biology books that I was beginning to read in full force.

When faced with such overwhelming contradiction I was forced to come to the conclusion that at least one faction of these adults out there were purposefully printing falsehoods. And when the choice came down to deciding between the calm, measured, reasoned voices in my science and nature books, and the paranoid histrionics in stuff like Primal Man...well, it was a pretty easy decision to make.