The Nicks Mix: Novels and short stories, comic and cartoon and caricature art, music and musings and a kid's corner--from today and the reflective past.
______________________________________________________________
Jerry Nichols, the author of the MacGroon Curse, is a retired graphic artist. The book cover was drawn and produced by Nichols and his life partner Julie Stein. They currently live in the boondocks somewhere in Michigan. They have three sons and a grandson, all of who live in more civilized Denver.
Nichols co-created the novel URSHRAK with illustrators Greg and Tim Hildebrandt (Bantam Books, 1979). Nichols has twice published nostalgia pieces but another thick novel and a novella and various short stories reside unpublished in his file cabinet along with reams of outlines and backgrounds and beginning chapters of other projects, and comic art and ideas, as well. Nichols worked 41 years in advertising and promotion but as a self-promoter he’s been pure crapo.
Some of the pale unpublished file drawer waifs, however, will appear on the lit pages of The Nicks Mix.com.
The MacGroon Curse
It's 1998 and young career woman Lee Stewart is on schedule to become a bride and mother in suburban Detroit. But a strange art museum experience spawns an excursion to Michigan's 'Thumb' leading to even stranger experiences in the remote dwarf-dominant community of Chubone, home of the oddball MacGroon clan.
And this is barely the beginning.
Battling doubts of her own sanity, Lee is put into the path of a predatory psychiatrist and then Agnes a woman literally in flight and badly in need of a rescue and a friend. Shortly following, Lee is plunged into an entanglement that includes her own periodic perils, an ancient curse linked with modern sorcery and a crimson sorceress, dreams and drugs and computer technology, look-alikes and mistaken identities, U.S. presidents, a crazed biker and his gang, castle break-ins and searches, and in service to her quest to rescue Agnes a venture into the anti-war turmoil of summer 1968 Chicago--the year of her birth--and then into medieval times where she finds herself aligned with a freedom fighting band of Scots.
And this is only part of the adventure returning her toward rural Chubone and a conclusive All Hallows Eve clash.
Can Lee manage to re-gain and hang onto her mantra-descriptive 'normalcy'?
Can she manage to hang onto all her marbles?
It won't be a piece of cake.
Find out here. (adult content, language, not particularly recommended for children)
________________________________________________________________________________________
Attacked at the Triple X
I see that some guy won a giant sweepstakes the other day. Instanly he went from rags to riches.
In mid-summer of 1949 when I was eleven, I was dead certain something like that had happened to me, to me and to my buddies Gordy and Leroy and Big Spike.
__________________________________________________________________________________
A few days ago my sister and I were talking on the phone about the summer heat. She thought that it was hotter now than back in the day, like in the forties and early fifties when she and I were growing up. But we all know that back in the old days everything was more extreme.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Want to know more about us?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Mr. Tangurang Arrives is a rhyming children's tale in unfinished storyboard form stressing childhood imagination. It's a story designed for approximate ages 3 to 12--but all are invited!
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Though not always present, Harlow is lead character in his own little world scenes. He's not the leading man, mind you, since he's decidedly character actor material. Born in '97 and active only a short time, new panels of Harlow may be forthcoming. Hope you enjoy.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
You can write us at thenicksmix@gmail.com