Comic Books and the Catholic Church or "Hey, You Big Bully, Quit Kicking Religion in my Face!"

In an earlier entry I wrote about the Spire Christian Comics group and the way they used Archie and his "pals n' gals" to sell Christianity to an unsuspecting youth audience. On a recent trip to Toronto I came across a fine stack of Christian comic books that pre-dated Al Hartley's Spire Christian Comics of the 1970s by a good twenty-two years. I wrote previously of Archie's beef with evolution being taught in schools, and Betty Cooper's disdain for sleazy Adult movie theatres in Manhattan. Those Archie comics may appear reactionary in the extreme, but I really did not know the meaning of right wing Christian comics books, until I bought a stack of pulp funnies called Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact.



Just like Spire, Geo A. Pflaum Publishers did not advertise the fact that their comic book line was religious in any capacity. A casual glance at a random issue of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact would lead even the youngest of children to conclude it was a run-of-the-mill, rather typical, rather unmemorable cheapie adventure comic. I admit that even coming across it for the first time at the age of twenty-six, I figured it to be nothing more than a poorly conceived Johnny Quest style adventure book with some boring one page gags thrown in for comic 'no-pun-intended' relief. I quickly tossed it onto a pile that included a Dell Get Smart, DC's Adventures of Bob Hope, a racist piece of Charlton war junk, and a Jimmy Olsen 80 pg Giant. The following day I flipped through my new comics on a sofa, picked up the poorly drawn cover of the most ambiguous book in the pile and realized I had indeed found treasure.

Your regular everyday comic book circa 1966 would have an ad on the back cover for either Charles Atlas body building, maybe a "Make Money Get Prizes" type thing, some sort of "Finish School at Home" scheme, or an ancient black and white photo of a paperboy suggesting you should try a career selling the mysterious "favorite family newspaper" that you and nobody you know has ever heard of, Grit. Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact did a very good job from 1946 to 1972 of looking like your regular everyday comic. Upon closer scrutiny however, readers are shocked to discover that from cover to cover it contains no fun ... and definitely no fact.



On the back cover of Treasure Chest's November 1967 issue is an ad for Maryknoll Fathers of Maryknoll, New York. A company/church/business devoted to training young people to become missionaries. The ad breaks down like this. At the top of the page is the splash title "The Last American Priest in Communist China" Then follow five comic panels. The first has a drawing of said Bishop and the caption, "Bishop Walsh, still in a communist prison in Shanghai was sentenced to 20 years. Bishop Walsh was imprisoned because evil hates goodness(!)" The next panel shows a typically inhumane "Chinaman" threatening the bishop with a fist. The caption reads, "The Communist Leaders want goodness kept away from the people..." The third panel of the advertisement shows Walsh's hand on the shoulder of a melancholic child, "People in countries where religion is not practiced are a very sad people. Where there is God there is love and happiness." From herein the religious pitch comes on heavy and concludes with a dotted coupon to fill in, cut out, and send off. "Dear Father, I wish to learn more about a Maryknoll (check one) 1. Brother 2. Sister. Please send your free booklet to the address below."



Treasure Chest emerged at a time when the entire comics industry was coming increasingly under fire from righteous moral do-gooders in paranoid cold war America. Dr. FredericWertham's treatise, Seduction of the Innocent has become the stuff of legend what Joe McCarthy was to the film industry Wertham was to comics. With the help of congress' greatest anti-communist bigots, Wertham was able to cripple many popular aspects of the industry, chastising the gore and brutality of Bill Gaines' EC horror and crime comics (which had ironically started out as a failing comic company that published primarily comic renderings of bible stories) and less notable comics from other companies were suddenly not considered "appropriate" for children. Testimony in front of congress, and pressure from all sides of the comic book industry, resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority which carried a logo that probably looks familiar even to people who've never picked up a comic in their life.




As the fifties were emerging as a dangerous time to be a progressive, suddenly horror, crime, and many superhero comic books were to suffer, replaced by innocuous funny animals and incredibly racist Western Comics (not to mention hypocritical, EC was driven out of business for depicting brutal murders of individuals preying upon each other, but it was quite all right for wild west heroes to murder hundreds of Natives). Responding to this increasing conservatism and hysterical concern for youth the Geo A. Pflaum Publishers out of Dayton, Ohio cut a deal with Catholic schools in the Eastern United States. Pflaum was well respected in the secular world for his other religious propaganda aimed at youth such as The Young Catholic Messenger, Junior Catholic Messenger, Our Little Messenger, and Witness.



Unlike the later Spire Christian Comics that would feature things children might actually be interested in like the Archie characters or the Dallas Cowboys, Treasure Chest always had a much stronger political slant. Their now legendary serial This Godless Communism spanned an incredible eighteen chapters over the course of several issues. This series has reached near mythic statues in comic book history, not just because it is an insane relic of laughable cold war propaganda but because of who the artist is. None other than the well-known EC artist who specialized in the forbidden horror genre, Reed Crandall, illustrated the entire lily white Christian piece. Known best for his depictions of head splitting gore, Crandall found work with Treasure Chest (after struggling to look for work everywhere else, thanks a lot Doc Wertham) was Graham Ingles, a graphic pensman who was as responsible as anybody for the unique look in Tales From the Crypt. He signed all of his stories Ghastly, although he probably failed to mention this when he got the call from Pflaum. The thing that's so bizarre about the strong right wing politics that Treasure Chest pushed is that nothing is likely to make a child lose interest faster than talk of politics. Treasure Chest was seemingly a powerful geist for anti-left propaganda, but upon further examination it is more likely that children found it incredibly boring, and saved their spare time for the more normal (and perhaps even more realistic!) superhero fodder of the newsstands.


These flamboyant, paranoid, examples are extreme to say the least. However, Treasure Chest could often be much more subtle when presenting its politics. During the period of history that Treasure Chest published, the United States Postal Service charged different rates for different classes of mail. In order to qualify for the cheaper mailing rates magazines enjoyed, comic books had to fit the definition of a magazine. This meant including plain text and not just illustration. So, if you thumb through any old Gold Key whether it is Andy Panda or Uncle Scrooge, any Dell issue of Mod Squad or what have you, you will always find one unrelated page of text, probably written in less than a minute, usually carrying a title like "Bobby Finds Adventure in the Congo". Treasure Chest was never one to invest an unnecessary buck into their product, and they too produced these boring pages of text that no child in the history of man has ever bothered to read.


Each issue of TCFF from the mid-60s featured a page of text that was intended to encourage children to pick a respectful occupation. The February 1965 edition has a drab looking article called "Would You Like to Be a Teacher?" It starts off straightforward enough, "Teaching is a vocation. One in which a man or woman dedicates himself or herself to the betterment of mankind." Fair enough, but as the page drones on, it slowly enters into Treasure Chest's trademark lack of subtlety. "The school teacher has a sacred trust from God. This is why, for instance, the teaching of religion presents the very highest level of teaching. I have talked with experts in the education field and they tell me that there is an urgent need for Catholic teachers even outside the Catholic school system. These same men tell me that Catholic teachers can do an immeasurable amount of good serving on the teaching staffs of public schools, state colleges and universities. Here the teacher can influence other teachers He sees that God's laws are not overlooked or forgotten." Later on the writer gets a little meaner, "Many of the teachers [at universities] have brilliant minds but they know little about God. You should remember that when it comes time for you to choose a college..."

Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact's January 1965 issue asks children, "Would You Like to Be an Entertainer?" and explains, "If you want to be an entertainer someday, remember two things: the profession is an honored one, and it is one of great responsibility. What happens when you get an entertainer who doesn't realize what an honored profession it is? The TV entertainer who has a show of his own and who will allow all kinds of trashy people, as well as trashy acts to appear on his show? Show business today needs good Catholics but I mean good Catholics."

And one final example comes from the November 1964 issue and the piece, "Would You Like to Be a Scientist?" which features the passage, "There are those scientists who would have you forget God and rely completely upon the powers of science. Some scientists are simply trying to take over the powers of life and death and thus set themselves up as God."

Another regular feature that occurred in the text only format was a page called Exclusively for Girls that would dispense information about current fashion trends (no matter what the trend was always long dresses and vacuous sweaters).

Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was marketed exclusively through Catholic schools. Since it was only available through school it had a very unconventional publishing schedule. If one reads the fine print at the bottom of the inside front page we discover that "Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact [is] published every two weeks during the school year since March 7, 1946." I'm not old enough to have experienced TCFF in its original run, but the tradition of handing out horrible comic books with bad art, bad ideas, and insufferable morality tales continued for years in various incarnations. Although they contained little religious connotation, I do remember the excitement of receiving these in school for free only to be furious at the contents:

Spiderman fought drug abuse in Canadian cities in six awful freebie giveaways conceived in 1990. The day we received them in grade five, most copies ended up torn in half and left on the ground in front of the school during recess. Drawn by American artists (with the exception of a cover drawn by Todd McFarlane check out that bad ass syringe!), Spiderman attends what is supposed to be a hockey game in one ineptly drawn series of panels, which made me nauseas when I first attempted to read it the day they were handed out. Treasure Chest never tackled the joys and sins of drug use, but they did endure (during the school year anyway) in four separate decades. By the early seventies the company was waning, and in its last couple years branched out from the in-house only distribution of schools, and placed its fate on regular newsstand sales. No record of how well it sold beside real comics like Batman or Pep exists but it had its final issue July '72, so that should give you a clue. Treasure Chest lasted for an incredible twenty five years and came out with five hundred issues. This puts it high on the list of the longest running comic books of all time(!). They seem to be most common in New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Ontario.

Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact often utilized the talents of several bonafide comic artists who had no real allegiance to God or the Catholic Church. They were hired on their abilities to illustrate, and this lends those issues an aire of credibility they would never otherwise have. They have all the elements of an entertaining comic from the Silver Age, the aging pulp smell, the goofy ads, the style of comic art that has now become a cliche ... all this plus a strong dose of Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell/John Ashcroft style insanity shockingly mainlined to your senses. A real treasure, fun in spite of itself, and devoid of facts and really, that's the way comics should be. Here are several sample pages from various Treasure Chest issues, you can click on the images to enlarge them so they'll be easier to read.

The End!