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Most of Jeff Lok’s career was dedicated to comics with extremely dark and strange humor. Its rough line was a big part of the appeal of those strips. At Fieldmouse Press we published his memoirs. Wholewhich was a great step forward artistically and narratively. Lok lost none of his dark, acidic sense of humor in a memoir that was essentially a destruction of the American dream.
His most recent comic, The fifth time is the charmcontinues to focus on his memories, this time returning to his childhood. Lok revisits old and strange memories, revealing spooky events but otherwise not entirely. As in Wholewhere crazy events are told in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style, this comic also begins with Lok sucking on a strap-on dildo before being pinned by a woman. The joke here is that he’s in a seedy motel, but they were both surprised that the bed wasn’t secured. Lok’s plump character design and harsh line erase any trace of eroticism in this scene; It is meant to be absurd.
This reminds him of his childhood friend whose father constantly (and creepily) recorded him and threw him down the stairs at random. His friend’s behavior was strange enough to suggest that some kind of horrible abuse was occurring, but it remained outside of young Lok’s consciousness. Much of this comic focuses on core memories, but also on memory gaps, implying that trauma is the cause of many of these gaps. The most interesting thing about this comic is that just when it seems like Lok is rambling discursively with an anecdote, he suddenly ties it into this central, vague idea that there’s a mystery he can’t quite unravel. An anecdote about being trapped in the Dartmouth library at night was a way for Lok to explore the idea of destiny, while discovering a book that he not only never saw again, but could not prove existed. There’s a David Lynch quality to all of this: the dark underpinnings of a childhood that had certain utopian qualities, like his parents building a tree house, a pool, and more in their spacious backyard. His friend’s presence undermined all of this somewhat, but Lok freely associated with him. Lok has really hit on something here, and it’s exciting to see him working in the same vein as Totality.