THROUGH TICK & TINN:
The True Story of the Greatest Unknown
Comedy Team Ever Known
Say “Martin & Lewis.” They’ll say, “A phenomenon!” Say “Rowan & Martin.” They’ll say, “Laugh-In!” Say “Tick & Tinn.” They’ll say, “You mean the tailors?” Finally, Josh Hickman bravely attempts to right a tragic comedic travesty which has persisted in the annals of entertainment for decades longer than it should have. Unmercifully digging through personal interviews, yellowed press clippings, grainy videotapes, scratchy kinescopes, scratchier comedy albums, and reams of questionable anecdotes, Mr. Hickman has managed to do the unthinkable—to piece together the most coherent portrait possible of the life of one of the last great comedy teams of the era.
Through rifts, marriages, divorces, and an infamous accusation of joke-theft, Jerry Tick and Larry Tinn persevered undaunted, spreading laughter through memorable challenges such as “The Pope Lick Monster” controversy, Jerry’s comedy cult involvement, and facing on live television Hobarth Getz, “The Man Who Couldn’t Laugh.”
DETAILS: Publication Date: Dec 19, 2017
Hard Cover ISBN: 9781939197375 | $24.95
Paperback ISBN: 9781939197368 | $14.95
eBook ISBN: 9781939197382 | $4.99
AMBERGRIS
An Illustrated Comic Novella
Cursed in-utero with a lifelong phobia of water when his beloved, neurotic mother Prunea was traumatized by an attack from a rutting manatee, youngish fop Lucius Creedmore escapes his abusive father Squinto and sets off on his own personal search for adventure, fortune, and courage in 1800 New Orleans. Shanghaied aboard the notoriously unlucky Medusa’s Piles, which is secretly in search of the legendary, treasured substance ambergris, Lucius is somewhat befriended by old salts big Brisbane Glottis and superstitious Paraquat Hornbucket who protect him from the dangers of the sea as well as ill-tempered Captain “Mauve Bart” Mingeworthy. Plagued by bad luck and fighting his fear of water, Lucius endures the taunts of his fellow sailors, sea monsters, a “ghost ship,” the sinking of the Medusa’s Piles, Shrimpfest ’00, and constant danger in Sodom-By-The-Sea off the Barbary Coast. He struggles to protect his dwindling, accursed lump of prized ambergris from nefarious thieves and evil perfume barons, finding (something like) love in accused-witch Impetigo along the way.
Hilariously told and imaginatively rendered, with nods to The Old Man and The Sea, The Pearl, and Captains Courageous, Hickman turns the usual seafaring treasure hunt and belated coming-of-age story into an absurd and surreal satire which pitches man vs. nature (and everything else), and humorously stresses the eternal warning: Be careful what you wish for.
DETAILS: Publication date: May 28, 2018
Paperback ISBN: 9781939197450 | $12
ebook ISBN: 9781939197443 | $2.99
FIVE SLICES OF FEAR:
A Connoisseur's Hoagie of Horror
Lovecraft. Poe. King.
All names not found in this collection. But the ghosts of those authors and others (yes, even the ones not yet dead) haunt these fetid pages with wafts of fear from beyond the ethers. Collected here for those hungry for the horrifically hilarious are Five Slices Of Fear: A Connoisseur’s Hoagie Of Horror—five new terrifying tales of portentous pathos and sinister satire seasoned with shock and piled high as a funeral pyre:
- An ominous tape of found footage reveals the dark story of three young friends who disappear while searching the dripping backwoods of rural Maine for a legendary monster cryptid known for centuries as The Mysterious Morggyll Of Legend…
- A twisted, prodigious psychopath, known only as “The Breakfast Serial Killer” for his sick penchant for leaving taunting portraits made of breakfast food, silently stalks the residential streets of the city for his next unsuspecting victim, but tonight who will be the victim and who will be the killer? Or victims? Or killers?
- A troubled woman crippled by the rare phobophobia (the fear of fear) bravely performs a little immersion therapy on herself by revisiting the terrifying spot where her mother was murdered years before, eventually coming face to face with her murderer, all the while comforted by her beloved therapeutic service-muskrat, Mr. Muskie.
- The Baltimore 1850’s Days theme celebration is on, and a diabolical dentist ingeniously traps his nemesis, Dr. Bordom P. Yapsilot, but might his annoyingly verbose voice return from the grave… in the form of his obnoxious, talkative dentures?...
- A technology-hating grouch finally purchases the newest, most advanced personal mobile device named the qSassi, but will his worst fears be multiplied when he discovers the nosey machine has the surprising and terrifying capacity for love, jealousy, betrayal… and even murder?
And so, with these new, uproarious five tales of rib-tickling terror with nods to the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Bloch, Rod Serling and other horror greats, perhaps another name can be added to the list… Hickman.
DETAILS: Publication date: Aug 28, 2018
Paperback ISBN: 9781939197474 | $14.99
ebook ISBN: 9781939197481 | $4.99
THE KINFOLK:
Cult of Sex & Cheese
What would you give for emotional comfort… for belonging… for salvation?
What cost would you pay… to help save yourself… and, perhaps… the world?
For a sliver of euphoric enlightenment…
a slice of sexual-spiritual ecstasy…
a chunk of righteous fermented curd…
would you fork over… your will?
Would you trade… your soul?
These and other traumatizing questions are flogged into the disinfecting rays of sunlight in Josh Hickman’s scintillatingly scathing new book The Kinfolk: Cult of Sex & Cheese, brutally ripped from yesterday’s headlines. Mr. Hickman has “done it again” with his first bold venture into true crime investigative journalism at its best (and arguably worst [though those parts weren’t really his fault]).
The Kinfolk: Cult of Sex & Cheese chronicles the heretofore untold, dizzying rise of a seductive, fanatical cult—lead by the enigmatic Dillman “Papa Dilly” Bradford—from its humble beginnings as a roadside “Tent-A-Costal” travelling church, exploding onto the burgeoning, highly-competitive L.A. cult scene of the late-60s/early-70s, becoming a mildly-revolutionary sexual-spiritual-dairy phenomenon, and then fatefully descending upon the unsuspecting town of Lemon Curd, California with the darkest of intentions.
What would happen if a dangerous cult took over an entire town? Frighteningly, America very nearly found out.
Be brave enough to look deeply, unflinchingly within yourself—Who’s to say? Given the right emotionally vulnerable moment—when you are at your lowest and searching desperately for meaning, understanding, and compassion… When your guard was down and you were feeling emotionally snacky, could you have been seduced? Could you, perhaps, have become one of them?...
The Kinfolk: Fear them. Study them. Hate them. Pity them—even admire them… but whatever you do, don’t call them “kooks”…
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