Fred Carter, an African-American cartoonist, was perhaps an unlikely collaborator for evangelical extremist author, Jack Chick. The two are best known for Chick tracts, small comic booklets, often handed out on the streets and to prisoners by evangelicals, that warned of the coming of a One World government, the gay agenda, and the evils of witchcraft and Dungeons & Dragons. Jack Chick wrote and drew the early tracts before Carter joined him as the artist. It was probably Carter's excellent artwork that ultimately made the tracts so successful.
Chick tracts were meant to be taken seriously, and obviously were by evangelicals — in some ways they layed the groundwork for today's QAnonsense (with child-sacrificing Satanists being a favorite tract theme). But the tracts were so over the top and hysterical–all given an order and earnestness in Carter's art–that they've become highly collectable among comics fans, art hipsters, zinesters, and other collectors of high weirdness.
A reported billion Chick tracts have been printed. Perhaps owing to the racism, homophobia, and other phobias of Jack Chick, Carter was never credited on the comics and it was 9 years into their association before Chick even acknowledged him.
Jack Chick died in 2016. Fred Carter died on May 9, at the age of 83.
