A Harry Potter satire that's "off the chain!"

Normally, satires are supposed to be funny. It's typically a pre-condition. I guess it's possible to just have a bad satire, or a satire that does humorously mock itself, if only unintentionally.

Anyway, what I have for you today is Hairy Polarity, a Harry Potter satire from a fundamentalist Christian website. It's a comic book. Alas, unlike Chick tracts, it only provides you the first 8 pages, but that's plenty to give you the gist. We're told that it is "a creatively crafted fictional comic book story," revealing "the very real dangers of sorcery and witchcraft contained within the Harry Potter series!"

What I loved about it was that at first, I thought for sure it was mocking anti-Harry Potter Christians. The artwork was too professional (compared to Chick), and it was way too stereotypical - the caring Christian parents who try the art of gentle persuasion to reach their wayward son, the I-was-once-involved-in-that-too-before-I-found-Jesus trope, the kid walking into an obvious evil, and the ominous warning asteriks pointing to Bible verses. It even uses Chick-like stabs at kid's slang - it's the "wack" world of magic, "phat" story ideas that are "slammin" or "off the chain!" "No diggity," indeed.

Though like Titus 1:12, it poses a paradox. On page 3, Ari says to his friend Minnie, "Then again, Mom says just reading about witchcraft is how she got into that too - and that I shouldn't fill my mind with this stuff!" This comes, of course, in a comic book about the dangers of witchcraft... so we shouldn't read that either? But we wouldn't have gotten that advice unless we read about witchcraft in the first place. It's totally Titus 1:12! Or maybe Deuteronomy 25:19, which encourages the Israelites to wipe out all memory of Amalek - thus preserving the memory of Amalek in the Bible, forever.

Anyway, check out the rest of the site too. They also have stuff on rock music (a comic about a Satanic rocker named Madonna Dahmer), evolution, homosexuality, and of course, safe sex and abortion. It's sweet.

Hat tip - SpottyLogic.

Oh, and in a related note, it seems that Harry Potter's name might've been pilfered outright from a bad 80's horror film called Troll starring Sonny Bono, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, June (Lassie, Lost in Space) Lockhart, and The Neverending Story's Noah Hathaway as... Harry Potter, who finds himself in danger from magic, wizards and witches. I kid not.

UPDATE: It seems that Jerry Falwell has praised Hairy Polarity: "The unique format of Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire grabs young people's attention with the biblical truths that will transform their lives."