Interview: Greg Lockard talks Trick Pony, his latest graphic novel

After meeting him after a panel at last year’s FlameCon in NYC and following his work on Instagram ever since, I was super excited to get the chance to sit down and chat with Greg Lockard about his newest graphic novel, Trick Pony, his previous editing work at DC & Vertigo Comics, and the current state of LGBTQ+ representation in today’s comic book/graphic novel industry. You can follow Greg on Instagram and you can pre-order the physical version of Trick Pony at www.greglockard.com or grab the digital version now on Comixology.

NOTE: This interview was edited for brevity & clarity.

DERBY COMICS: Hello! And thank you so much for joining me today. I can't believe we've been talking about Trick Pony off and on since FlameCon last year. Congratulations on it finally being available in digital and soon to be in print!

GREG LOCKARD: Yeah, thank you! It's funny with the delay between digital and print so this is exciting.

DERBY COMICS: Can you give us an overview on what readers can expect from the story?

LOCKARD: Sure. Trick Pony is a story about Jimmy Thomas, a gay rodeo star in a fantasy queer rodeo in a slightly fictionalized American Southwest. He's achieved all his dreams, or what he thought were all his dreams, and he’s kind of starting to question his world. He gets a call from home about his father being sick and it triggers a road trip. He quits the rodeo and goes on this road trip home.

So it's a road trip story with no, or low levels of trauma. It's a happier story than what’s typical of Westerns for queer people.

DERBY COMICS: Queer stories do deal a lot with trauma. When writing, how do you balance telling authentic stories, without potentially causing others to relive trauma that they might've experienced in their life?

LOCKARD: It's very difficult for me. It's definitely something that I reflect on when I write, because it is easy, especially for my age group. We didn't have a lot of queer fiction when we were growing up so that a lot of it was full of the stereotypes that we're fighting against today. A lot of things have changed rapidly and wonderfully between generations, but my default maybe is towards those sad boy stories in general because that's the fiction and the pop culture that I love.

And I think there is value to that. Those stories do need to be told and there is a healing aspect to those stories. Trick Pony is actually a great example and it gives a lot of credit to my co-creator Anna David in shifting the tone and the subject matter. I started Trick Pony without a co-creator, but it was a good example to me of where I gravitate towards when I’m left to my own devices. 

When I started writing, the story was approved tentatively while we looked for an artist. What was great about Anna was that I instantly knew her art was the answer. When I saw it, it was really a magical moment, but there were elements of the story that just didn't seem to fit once we were working on it together. It was really interesting to me how she shifted that to something that was ultimately a little bit younger in subject matter, and a little bit lighter and more joyful which I'm eternally grateful for because it's a completely different story with her as co-creator. It's wonderful.

DERBY COMICS: That's so interesting! How much of the story, if anything, did you edit once Anna came on board?

LOCKARD: I had a one-sheet that I used to pitch the project with. And then I had, let's call them mood boards of film stills and character references. I was building those ideas and I had a loose outline in my head, but it is a story that had lived with me for so long. So nothing had to be edited on paper or outside of my big ideas. 

DERBY COMICS: I don't know if it was intended, but it really felt like Anna took an approach where the art kind of evolved over the course of the story along with Jimmy’s journey. Was that intentional in your vision or was that all Anna?

LOCKARD: That's really cool! That is all Anna. None of that was written as such. I didn't even realize it, but you're seeing both of us change as we're getting deeper into it because I didn't work from an outline and because there was a pivot in the story when Anna joined. I think you're probably seeing the writing that changed too that maybe affected that.

DERBY COMICS: Can you talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea for a queer rodeo story?

LOCKARD: For like the longest time, I had an image saved of Robert Redford in The Electric Horseman. And, you know, that character is not gay or queer as presented in that film but maybe a fanfic or whatever that's been sort of dwelling in me. It comes from a place of country music, Westerns, & cowboy culture that is such fun imagery to play with but has been so misogynistic. It’s erased indigenous people and has been racist and just bad to everyone except straight white men stereotypically. I wanted something more for us than Brokeback Mountain, which is a beautiful movie, a beautiful short story and needs to exist, but I wanted to see where we could go next. And so that character [Robert Redford’s] just stuck with me.

DERBY COMICS: That’s great [laughs]. Other than Brokeback Mountain, were there any other sources of inspiration or influences?

LOCKARD: In terms of other influences, for the road trip story, Wizard of Oz is obviously a big influence and there are references to Wizard of Oz throughout. Red River is a Montgomery Cliff & John Wayne film that has some queerness or queer undertones to it and behind the scenes was apparently pretty brutal for Montgomery Cliff. So I did visit that world as we were starting. There is an element I wanted to pull from acid Westerns and the hallucinatory aspects. 

Liebestrasse, my first graphic novel with Tim Fish, is historical fiction and there are no elements of fantasy. There's no genre beyond historical fiction. And [with Trick Pony] I wanted to play with the comic book aspects. So pulling in the more fantastical really helped tie it all together and give Jimmy these flashbacks that blur the lines between memory and hallucination and fantasy. With the Wizard of Oz references, it helped move it into a place more towards a fairy tale, like Big Fish, that has those aspects of telling a story bigger than these lives. And I just love it because even with the fairytale aspect of it, it's still a very emotional human story for both Jimmy, his place in the world, and his place with his family.

DERBY COMICS: You mentioned Liebestrasse, and I actually wanted to ask about that. What was it like writing historical fiction graphic versus a fantasy story like Trick Pony?

LOCKARD: I thought that Liebestrasse would be more pressure because I admittedly am not a huge history buff. But as I’m aging, I'm becoming more so. The fact that it was Germany during World War Two where Tim and I wanted to tell our story, and it's an area that's well covered in non-fiction and fiction pop-culture and it's a topic that is so important, there was added pressure of getting it all right.

I think queer people and gay people know what happened in Berlin during and what society was like before the war, but a lot of straight people don't. So showing the lives behind what eventually became the horrors of the Holocaust was really important, but it was also a lot of pressure.

So I thought going into it, Trick Pony would be easier because I was very intentionally not doing a modern Western, but also not doing a historical document because I did want it to be free of the weight of queer people's treatment historically and stereotypically in those situations. It then became more personal maybe in the absence of that. And equally, it's difficult to write in a different direction. So I remain defeated [laughs].

DERBY COMICS: In addition to your own graphic novels you have written for DC Comics, including DC Pride 2022. What is it like writing for established characters compared to creating your own characters who people have never experienced before? 

LOCKARD: I think there's a pressure in having a built-in audience for established characters, regardless of how obscure they are. They're always someone's favorite. I grew up on superhero comics and up to a certain point I had some experiences where a story really put me off the characters.

For the DC Pride Anthology, it was nice because I was given a specific set of characters and, in this case, specific continuity parameters so it had to fit in with the existing Justice League issues by Steve Orlando and all those artists that collaborated with him on that run. So that was actually freeing. It was super fun to geek out and go through my old comics, like the Joe Quesada foil covers and revisit killer costumes and hopefully, you know, do right by those characters.

And then Apollo & Midnighter, of course, I did a short romantic story. Due to the terror of letting those fans down, the whole story was outside of continuity for that reason. I could get long hair Apollo back and hopefully do something different and unexpected with them. They're definitely icons in a certain pocket of queer comic book fans.

DERBY COMICS: You mentioned intimidation sometimes working on characters that you like or who have big followings, but are there some that you would want to work on? Do you have any dream projects that you would want to take on?

LOCKARD: I think writer Greg would say there's a ton of superheroes that I would love to write. I have a list and I have notes like any fan. I have ideas for my favorite characters and whether I ever get to those or not is fine. 

The area I'm writing towards next is historical fiction again. Like 40s/50s Hollywood is an area I'd really like to visit. Hopefully, knock on wood [laughs]. And horror fiction, maybe skewing more towards old school horror. I always say Rosemary's Baby but I'm afraid if it ever gets made and someone said this is NOT Rosemary's Baby I'll feel bad [laughs]. Something a little more psychological and kind of old school classic Hollywood in styling.

DERBY COMICS: Going back to the beginning of your career, how did you get your start in comics?

LOCKARD: I got really lucky with an internship at DC in editorial and I was matched with the Vertigo office. So I was in that office for the Summer and got to meet my editor heroes like Karen Berger and Shelly Bond and Will Dennis. It was such an amazing educational experience. People like Phil Jimenez and Neil Gaiman were coming into the office just working on the books at that time.

And then I went back to school, graduated and sort of started applying for jobs there. Eventually I got a job in editorial administration, which is sort of like the interior support group that serves as HR for the freelancers. That was great too because it sort of got me more exposure to all of DC's freelancers and all the editors. And then at one point, about halfway through my career at DC, I switched over to back to Vertigo as an assistant editor. I started under Shelly [Bond] and through the magic of restructuring, I ended up being the only assistant editor for a little while. I was assisting all four editors on their books. So that was an amazing trial by fire. At that point, editors were not allowed to write also, and I knew I had to give writing a shot. So I started freelance editing slowly in 2015, and it's been almost 10 years now.

DERBY COMICS: That's awesome! You alluded to it, but you've either previously edited or are currently editing work by a veritable who's who of authors and talent. What is it like giving some of these big name writers feedback and how does it prepare you for your own writing?

LOCKARD: It's great. My undergrad concentration was creative writing and I learned very early how to give feedback to your peers. And maybe I do it on the scale of being more sensitive than other editors, but because I love writing myself I think I make sure the notes I'm giving are always with the goal of strengthening the story for readers. Because as an editor, you may be their first reader and they have to trust you with their work, and they have to trust the situation that you're creating to do their best work.

You don't need writers or artists or any of your collaborators to think you're trying to fix it or put your spin on it. I want whatever creative team I'm working with to be comfortable, on time, doing their best work, and feeling really proud of what they're doing. There are some pretty massive names and really talented writers and artists. So it's intimidating, but it's also really cool because you're watching your favorites do their best work.

DERBY COMICS: What’s a favorite comic book or graphic novel that you recently read that isn’t something you're working on yourself in any capacity?

LOCKARD: My favorite that I read recently is Marry Me a Little by Robert Kirby. It's a delightful memoir and Robert is someone I've known for a while passing through small press shows and the gay creator circle. 

DERBY COMICS: I'll definitely have to check that out! What's a question you've never been asked, but have always wanted to answer?

LOCKARD: That's awesome. I think a lot about what I would do if I wasn't doing this [writing/editing]. I really jumped around after graduation and had a lot of jobs before I got back to DC Comics. So I think a lot about taking my bartending experience and just working at some hotel bar on a beach somewhere [laughs]. So maybe what I would be doing if I wasn't doing comic books would be the question I’d want to answer. And hopefully I would have a better answer than bartending [laughs].

DERBY COMICS: [Laughs] That's awesome. Ok, last question. Where can fans look forward to seeing you next?

LOCKARD: Trick Pony comes out in print on June 6th and right now I'm trying to get on some bookstores’ radar and I’ll definitely be hanging out at San Diego Comic-Con. Over the Summer I'll probably be all over and annoying and posting a ton to get this book out there!

DERBY COMICS: Amazing! Thank you so much, Greg, for taking the time to chat with me and I hope everyone has a chance to read Trick Pony either digitally now or in print this June from Dark Horse Comics!