31 Days Of CCS, #12: Jeff Lok

Most of Jeff Lok's career was spent on extremely dark, bizarre humor comics. His scratchy line was a big part of the appeal of those strips. We at Fieldmouse Press published his memoir Totality, which represented a big step forward artistically and narratively. Lok didn't lose any of his bleak, acidic sense of humor in a memoir that was essentially a takedown of the American Dream.

His most recent comic, Fifth Time's A Charm, continues his focus on memoir, this time turning back to his childhood. Lok picks at old, strange memories, unspooling creepy but otherwise not totally events. Much like in Totality, where crazy events are told in a matter-of-fact, deadpan style, so too does this comic start with Lok sucking on a strap-on dildo before he gets pegged by a woman. The gag here is that it's in a seedy motel, but both of them were surprised that the bed wasn't bolted down. Lok's roly-poly character design and scratchy line obliterate any trace of the erotic from this scene; it's meant to be absurd. 

This causes him to reminisce about his childhood friend whose father recorded him constantly (and creepily) and threw him down the stairs randomly. His friend's behavior was weird enough to suggest that there was some kind of horrific abuse going on, but it stayed just outside young Lok's awareness. Much of this comic focus on core memories but also memory gaps, implying that trauma is the cause for a lot of these gaps. What's most interesting about this comic is that just when it seems like Lok is rambling discursively with an anecdote, he suddenly ties it back 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 fate, as he uncovered a book that he not only never saw again, he was unable to prove that it even 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 treehouse, a swimming pool, and more in their expansive back yard. The presence of his friend undermined all of this somehow, yet Lok freely associated with him. Lok has really hit on something here, and it's exciting to see him work in the same vein as Totality.