(courtesy Dark Horse Comics)
Making peace with your past is never easy.
Oh, wellness gurus and not a few self improvement books will guarantee it’s a simply a matter of throwing away the past, embracing the present and voila! a shiny new future awaits you, shorn of trauma and loss and all the things that once lingered and near-fatally ailed you.
But the truth is, the past doesn’t go easily, if at all, and it takes a brave soul indeed to look into long ago mistakes and grievous hurts and broken hearted sadness and think this could all get better.
Which is likely why Jimmy, the protagonist of Trick Pony by GLADD-nominated writer Greg Lockard is none too keen to embark on such a perilously trying journey preferring instead to perform in a barely attended arena rodeo show and to lose himself in all the tequila he can imbibe each night.
Is this a healthier alternative? Not even close, and everyone close to Jimmy (close being a hugely relative word here because he has walled out the world) knows it too, and you suspect, so does Jimmy too, though his polished act of jocular bravado would never allow for a second that that’s the case.
After a terrible fall one night, Jimmy makes a snap decision to head home on his beloved horse Emmylou to visit his ailing father who’s in the hospital and who may not make it (that could be more his mother’s worrying but Jimmy finally decides he can’t take that chance.
What unfurls after this impromptu decision to ride home on his horse is the stuff of magical realism and fantasy, with Jimmy visited by all kinds of creatures and ghosts representing actual trailing regrets of his past and unresolved monstrously large issues, all of it imbued with an emotional, grounded intensity that acts like an accelerated kind of therapy of the real world (or not so real as the case may be).
(courtesy Dark Horse Comics)
With Anna David’s gloriously dream like and vividly colourful artwork, and Lucas Gattoni’s lettering add some vibrant life to a story full of past loss and second chance hopes, and a beautiful reconciliation with everything he thought he had lost giving the final act a heart-stoppingly beautiful emotional resonance, Trick Pony is a joy to read because it feels like how life plays out for many of us.
Many of us are burdened by past trauma or loss, and the less-than-optimal decisions made in the wake, and we all wonder what it would be like to face up to the mess littering the path behind us, and find a way forward that feels freeing, alive and hopeful.
Trick Pony is not necessarily designed as a how-to manual, especially given the fact that actual magical realism is pretty thin on the ground in real life, but reading it leaves you realising how much we lose from imprisoning ourselves, often involuntarily and without realising the full effects of what we’re doing to ourselves, and how much freedom there is in riding, not literally like Jimmy, though the imagery is potent with meaning, into a future, uncertain of what awaits.
Certainly Jimmy’s decision to ride home is not a well thought-through one and is less one of calculation than of desperate, pressing need, and he’s definitely not expecting past mistakes and issues to manifest as they do, but it does bring him healing and a chance at another kind of life into which quite literally rides into the sunset, one of the most visually beautiful and narrative rich section of a wholly lovely and deeply affecting read.
Trick Pony is available from Dark Horse Comics.
(courtesy Dark Horse Comics)