Here He comes

We knew it would happen sooner or later, but who knew it would come so soon? Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end times. That's right. This is our final Bible Series Tract. It's a momentous moment for all of us. Please join wurwolf and me as we join Bob one last time in...






Lita:
Here he comes again,
Ooh, he'll make you flip,
Here he comes again,
When he's dancing 'neath the starry sky,
Here he comes again,
I kinda like the way he dips,
Well he's my best friend's girl,
He's my best friend's girl,
But he used to be mine!

wurwolf: Other than the line "he's my best friend's girl", I think that's the most awesome song about Jesus I've ever heard.



wurwolf: I love love love that Helen is sitting in the back seat while the two men are up front. How typical is that of Chick tracts?!

wurwolf: You know how in TV shows they do outside shots of a car driving down the street, but when they show what's going on inside the car it's on a sound stage and someone's shaking the car around to look like it's moving? I think that's what's going on here. From the outside, Bob's car looks like this:



but on the inside his car looks like this:



Lita: How come Damien didn't get raptured? He gave up the on the whoring.

wurwolf: In every tract we see him in, he's still wearing a black shirt, albeit without the collar. That tells me that he hasn't fully committed and is still a closet Catholic. He's probably got a shrine to Mary hidden away in the room he has in Bob's house.

Lita: Or maybe it's like how I'm going to hell just because my grandfather was a Freemason. Even though I'm a fully committed Christian and have never been a Mason myself, I still have Freemason stink all over me.

wurwolf: The sins of the fathers and all that.

wurwolf: Or in Damien's case, the sins of the Father.

wurwolf: And something just occurred to me -- since Damien is no longer a priest, what is he doing for a living now? Or is he just freeloading off of Bob and Helen?



Lita: Oh no! Fang is lost! He will burn in Hell forever! No wonder he looks so scared!

wurwolf: I doubt Fang is lost. He gets passed around from owner to owner. He's probably just with some new family.

Lita: He's lost in Christ.

wurwolf: Is that a bottle of whiskey flying out of the car when it hits the telephone pole?

Lita: Damien does have a history of drinking. But I think Bob and Helen were trying to set him up. That's why they bailed him out of the car. Now that great whore's pimp is going to face drunk driving charges!

wurwolf: Also flying out of the car: kiddie porn



Lita: Ohhhh. It Was All A Dream. That's too bad. I wanted to read a tract about a world without Bob.

wurwolf: You will be soon. This is Bob's last tract.

Lita: He'll still exist in these comics' "universe," though.

Lita: I guess this confirms that Damien is staying with Bob and Helen. It's like they're running a halfway house for former sinners.

wurwolf: Former celibate sinners. That's a single bed.

Lita: It sure is. Poor Helen.

wurwolf: She can always bang Damien on the couch. Or the kitchen table.

Lita: At that rate she may as well just do it on the tiny bed.

wurwolf: I'm sure she and Bob have separate twin beds, like Rob and Laura Petrie.

Lita: I bet every morning she combs the newspaper for news of fires. "Oh, Bob! The Jones's house burned down last night! Three people died and there's a kid in the hospital!" That burn ward buys her a lot of "Helen Time"

wurwolf: Left behind is in boldface again. Another shout out?

Lita: You know, I never read any of those books myself, so I'm probably a bad judge of this. But I did have several kids do book reports on books from the series while I was student teaching. It didn't strike me as overly Bible based.

Lita: Not that you can tell much from a kid's book report. But what the hell? It's about waging war against Satan! Fun!

wurwolf: I read about four or five of them when I was working at the Christian bookstore, but that was about ten years ago and I really don't remember anything about them. So I'm not particularly helpful.

Lita: Kirk Cameron is in the movie version.



wurwolf: I like Bob's black robe with the leopard skin collar.



wurwolf: By the way, it's not set in stone that we will be raptured before the Tribulation. It's what all Christians hope is going to happen, but we don't know for sure.

Lita looks up the verse Bob just threw out

Lita:

Then I saw thrones, and the people sitting on them had been given the authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony about Jesus and for proclaiming the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his statue, nor accepted his mark on their forehead or their hands. They all came to life again, and they reigned with Christ for a thousand years.

Lita: It's just about what happens to Christians during the tribulation. It doesn't say that these are post-rapture Christians.



wurwolf: Bob has been droning on the entire time it took Helen to make a pot of coffee and get Father Damien a cup.

Lita: "The Antichrist will be revealed! Are you interested?" "Are you kidding?" Seriously, Bob. You already told him the Antichrist is the Pope.

wurwolf: The tract cut Damien off before he could say, "It's two in the morning and I've got a long day of banging your wife while you're at work tomorrow! I'm going to bed!"



Lita: There are distinctly five horsemen in that picture of the four horsemen.

wurwolf: And one of them is on fire.

Lita: Also one of those horsemen is a Catholic priest and another is the Pope. Who knew? I wonder which plagues they represent. That Pope must be busy if he has to do double-duty as both the Antichrist and a horseman.

Lita: Poor Fire Horseman has to share a horse with the Turban Horseman

wurwolf: Poor Turban Horseman. I hope he's wearing asbestos.

wurwolf: I've seen fundamentalist literature that claims that Christ is the horseman on the white horse. I guess Bob is saying this guy is the Antichrist.

Lita: There's two white horses.

wurwolf: One's supposed to be gray.

wurwolf: You'd think Fire Horseman would be better off riding with Fireman Horseman.

Lita: Mongolian Horseman doesn't even get a horse. I guess nobody wanted to share with him.

wurwolf: Oh, he's Mongolian? I thought that was a fire helmet.



wurwolf: I like how the vultures pecked out the Arab guy's eyes. Nice touch.

Lita: They look happy to do it.



wurwolf: Okay. Bob's editorializing there.

Lita: No, the Bible actually says, "And lo, the Pope will be drooling all down the front of his robes waiting for the Jews to build a temple. He liketh the real-estate."

wurwolf: Wipe your mouth, your Holiness.

wurwolf: Is there such a thing as a Jesuit general?

Lita: Sure there is. It says so. In the Bible. Don't ask for a verse.

wurwolf: Okay!



Lita: The Pope has tons of authority to sign peace treaties on behalf of the nations of the world.

wurwolf: The guy in the bowtie in the picture of the Pope signing Sherry's birthday card is the guy from the Freemason's tract, I think.



wurwolf: The Pope is casting a skeptical glance at the Buddhist monk.

Lita: Heh. I think this is the first tract we've seen to include Surprise Buttsex

wurwolf: They saved the best for last.

wurwolf: It should say that then Satan slowly and gently enters the Beast.

Lita: Doesn't look all that slow and gentle to me. Look at the beads of sweat running down that poor guy's head!

wurwolf: Okay, so Satan's taking him by force. Why am I surprised? He is Satan, after all.

Lita: By the way, I thought the Beast was supposed to be the Pope. So why are we getting some random priest here?

wurwolf: Bob's making the claim that the Pope is the Antichrist and the Beast is the Jesuit General. Whatever that is.

Lita: Oh, ok. This whole thing is so confusing.

wurwolf: But aren't the Beast and the Antichrist the same person?

Lita: I've always been under the impression that the Beast was the Antichrist.



wurwolf: It's cool how the Beast's army has neat skull logos on their hats.



wurwolf: Wow! The Beast is on American Idol! So that's how he takes over the world!

Lita: "Hang Ten, dudes!"

wurwolf: He's totally Stayin' Alive!



wurwolf: The Pope's always making decrees about something. Why should people suddenly start listening to him now that it's the Tribulation?



Lita: You know, I'd have thought they'd just throw all the heads in a big bucket, but they're going through the trouble to drive stakes into the wall and mount the heads on them. This is indeed a quality operation.

wurwolf: Saddam Hussein and Lou Reed are working on adding more heads.

wurwolf: It looks like they're out of spikes. Where will they put this next head?

Lita: Looks like they might be late for lunch after all.

wurwolf: That's a dedicated executioner if he can chop off all those heads and still have an appetite for lunch.



wurwolf: Can wrath be kept in a vial?

Lita: God can keep His wrath wherever He wants.

Lita: You know, most people would take "his wrath will be poured out" as a figure of speech for "He'll get really mad and start punishing people." Leave it to Bob to take it completely literally.



wurwolf: Speaking of taking scripture literally, the locusts with the faces of men in Revelation are widely regarded to be helicopters. Not literal locusts, Bob.

Lita: I bet this is the artist's favorite tract ever. It's so gruesome.

wurwolf: Oh of course. And yet it wasn't gruesome enough -- they had to show Jesus on the cross, too.

wurwolf: This scene would be the perfect place to put Fang and Bad Cat. Fang's been reduced to posters for too long.

Lita: They really have been cheap with the Fang sightings lately. I feel cheated.

wurwolf: You'd think they'd finish that particular plot line up with a bang.



wurwolf: People in heaven: "Whoohoo, the Vatican's gone! I've been waiting for the place to burn down for an eternity."



Lita: Now it's payback time.

wurwolf: Bitches.

wurwolf: The angels are so casual about casting the Pope and the Jesuit General into the lake of fire. It's your big moment, guys! Get excited a little!

Lita: They're always just like, "Eh." Like they're throwing laundry into the hamper or something.

wurwolf: I know they've been tossing people into the Abyss left and right for years now, but this is the big one!



Lita: Even when they throw Satan in. It's just like, "See ya later, dude. Whatever."

wurwolf: "Have a nice trip. See you next fall."



wurwolf: Here's the movie of everyone's life. This guy's looks boring -- can we skip on to Genghis Khan or something?

Lita: Genghis Khan is too busy riding his invisible horse around with those other four guys.

Lita: I like that guy on the Jumbotron. He's all pointing his thumb at himself like, "Yeah! How about me? You motherfuckers don't have the guts to keep ME out of Heaven!

wurwolf: Why is God asking if that guy's name is in the Book of Life? He knows it's not. He's just trying to amp up the drama.

Lita: It's like at the end of any given reality show when they take forever to reveal who's leaving. They know darn well who it is. They just want to pad out the last five minutes of the show with tense silence.



Lita: Oh no! Now Bob is breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to US!

wurwolf: It's his last chance, too.

wurwolf: And this is how Bob leaves us. One last time to turn on the hypno-eyes.

Lita: Goodbye, Bob, you magnificent bastard.

wurwolf: You were.... well, not enjoyed.

Lita: That's what Helen said! (Ba-DUM-bum!)


(All the comic panels are copyright Chick Publications 2003 and the images were used according to Fair Use laws in the US.)