Though it's likely over by the time you read this, the latest news cycle has been filled with exciting balloon-based stories and speculation. And for us here, it brings to mind perhaps the greatest lighter-than-air evangelical saga ever depicted in the comic book medium!


Yes! Coming to your town, a harbinger of riots, confusion, fireworks, and salvation, it's the Gospel Blimp! How did this godly gasbag come to be? Who maintains it in its no-doubt holy hangar? And why can't we litter? Let's find out.


Already we're taking a sharp turn into the "Christians aren't supposed to drink" territory, which leads us straight into the kind of pick-and-choose nonsense numerology that permeated the era like lead fumes from the gasoline used at the time. Suffice to say the issue of how exactly you break a glass bottle onto the nose of a fabric bag filled with helium will not be addressed here.


Folks all over town will be looking up! And if they attempt to avert their eyes, they'll be forced to deal with our leaflets littering their lawns and sidewalks. As Jesus said in his famous Sermon On The Madison Avenue, "Media saturation is your best advertising value!"


We pray that George 's neighbor's heart will be filled with joy and love of Christ, as we dump trash on his lawn. After all he inspired it! This is all his fault.


You can TELL they're not CHRISTIANS because they're SMILING and ENJOYING THEMSELVES!!! (three exclamation points because this is an Al Hartley comic!!!)


They drink and play cards when they should be in church, and by golly that is simply not going to happen on the Nosy Busybody Neighbor Watch!


There's the answer!!! You can tell it's great because of the three exclamation points!!! Let's go walk next door and invite them to come to church with us next Sunday!

No, let's spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a blimp. That's the solution. Because Herm likes it.


Herm's real motivation: finding something he can stand next to that makes him look comparatively svelte.


It's bad enough that Joe's neglecting his wife and kids. But the lawn? This is getting SERIOUS.


Sorry to bother you George , I'm giving you one last chance to spend some time with me, maybe bring me over to Jesus, and save you a lot of time and effort on this whole blimp thing. One last chance George ! What do you say? No? You're going to go with the blimp? OK George .


If these guys were 10 they'd be prank calling and TP'ing George 's house. Their little one-sided battle with George would be strictly limited. But once Jesus gets involved, suddenly it's everybody's problem!


Look, the structural damage caused by a twelve thousand pound blimp crashing into the roof of a suburban home is one thing - what I'm really worried about are those spinning propeller blades and what they're doing to that kid in the sandbox.


You'd think the legal repercussions alone from that last disaster would ground the Gospel Blimp for good. But you can't keep a good public nusiance down (because it's filled with lighter-than-air gas)!


What horrifying nightmare lives do these people lead, driven to ecstasy by the mere idea of free bubble gum?


Unsure what "mocked out" means exactly. Sounds kind of intimate. This might be the most attention Freckle Girl has ever recieved!


Well, we're trusting The Lord for revival in this town! The Lord, and the expensive blimp we're using to leaflet-bomb. Everybody's gotta suffer until George Griscom's neighbor has a nervous breakdown or gets saved, whichever comes first.


So George, what's new with the target of our weird stalky attention? Oh, nothing new, wife's in the hospital. Nothing a blimpload of condescending literature won't fix.


TWO bottles of beer? TWO??? Yes citizens, what in the normal world would be a slight indulgence is here, in the Al Hartleyverse, a HARBINGER of DOOM


Look, this blimp organization wants to put the name of Jesus Christ on everybody's lips. And judging by the string of curses left in the wake of their floating nuisance, they're winning!


Gang, I make fun of these comics but I do love the cartooning here, this kind of clean-line, simple yet expressive depiction of an appalled-at-Jesus Blimp crowd was becoming increasingly rare in American comics as the 1970s progressed. Also, I could be wrong, but I think John Severin inked this.


Daily Record Calls For Anti-Aircraft Guns On City Hall, Or Maybe For Someone To Shove Herm Out Of The Gondola (full story Page 10)


Our new PR man was amazing. What better way to get the town on our side than lots of news stories about some crazed South American dictator lookalike dropping 'fire bombs' all over the city? Who wouldn't love that?


It was on Chinese night that all our goodwill was wiped out! Did our prayers come true? Was the blimp mistaken for part of an aerial surveillance program run by the People's Liberation Army, and shot down by an F-22 out of Langley?


Oh no, the loudspeaker system on the blimp has suddenly replaced all the audio on every program on every TV channel! With Chinese! How funny. Now it's at this point in the narrative that my inner Charlie Cale pops up to say "bullshit." (Poker Face reference!) And I said, well, let's check the source material and see if this really happened.


And the deal is, this is absolutely a work of fiction. There never was a real Gospel Blimp and it never crashed into George's neighbor's house or jammed every broadcast TV channel with one Chinese (or Polish, as stated in the original story) signal, which by itself would have been an amazing miracle.


Yeah, you can't go to school, you might get involved in one of those heavy "mock-out" sessions the kids are always talking about


This tremendously expensive, FCC violating, public nusiance reign of blimp terror might be coming to an end? Say it ain't so!


What's going to happen to your neighbors whom you barely know, ignore the hell out of, and yet have somehow become the focus of all your attention and energy? Get THERAPY, George!


Regarding people as expendable isn't the Christian way? You might want to check out what Christians do all the time, George, they expend people like crazy. It's kind of their thing.


Ah yes, ecology, that field of science chiefly concerned with "litter"


As Jesus said, "I am the way, and that way is aggressive, polluting capitalism." That's what he said, it's right there in this Bible we hastily scribbled it into!


Three years into their intensive air-war campaign to evangelicize George's neighbors, and somebody finally realized, hey, we could just... invite them over for a burger


THOSE neighbors? The BEER drinking neighbors? They're SAVED, three Al Hartley question marks???


"The blimp irritated me, the PA system was awful, the litter was terrible, the structural damage to my home was tremendously expensive, sorry about that lawsuit by the way, but you really left yourselves wide open for it, and hey, we used that money to add a new bedroom and a lot of improvements, so thanks!"


At first they thought George and Ethel were poor neighbors, mostly because George and Ethel were constantly having huge backyard BBQs and never inviting them. Which, yeah.


"We traded in our hollering and beer drinking for some glazed smiles and turtlenecks! What I'm trying to say is that it's the 70s! Quaaludes are everywhere!"


Let me be VERY CLEAR Joe. To HELL with YOU and your STUPID BLIMP!!!!


So remember kids, if you're ever tempted to spend enormous amounts of money - seriously, it costs twenty thousand dollars just for the helium for one of those blimps - on some kind of flying Jesus message delivery device, just take two seconds and think about how Jesus, the actual Jesus, would kick over the table upon which the blimp money was stacked, he'd use that cash to feed the hungry and clothe the needy, and then lecture you pampered middle-class suburbanites on your sinful lives of waste and privilege. Blimp out!

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