The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club. Then put up a review five days after its comic sequel comes out. Spoilers for the first Fight Club are up ahead but are those even spoilers anymore?
Written by Chuck Palahniuk
Illustrated by Cameron StewartSome imaginary friends never go away . . .
Ten years after starting Project Mayhem, he lives a mundane life. A kid, a wife, pills to keep his destiny at bay. But it won’t last long; the wife has seen to that. The time has come . . .
Rize or Die.
• Chuck Palahniuk writes the sequel to Fight Club!
• One of the most anticipated comics of the year.Named to ComicBook.com’s Top 10 Comic Events We Can’t Wait For in 2015!
“The first rule of Fight Club might be not to talk about it, but tongues are already wagging about Chuck Palahniuk’s sequel to his 1996 novel.” —The Telegraph (London)
“Just wait until you see what happens next.” —Hollywood Reporter Heat Vision, 5 Comics to Look Out For in 2015
For the four of you who’ve never had a conversation with a straight white dude, Fight Club is a novel turned film by Chuck Palahniuk about violence. There are certainly a ton of thematic elements floating throughout it – love, commercialism, soap – but the images that stick out most to filmgoer and reader alike are the really visceral moments. Jared Leto getting his beautiful face smashed in, the hole in the narrator’s mouth that he can fit his tongue through, buildings exploding to the tune of “Where Is My Mind?” in a scene that could never be filmed post-9/11. As such, Fight Club has been seen by many as a call to arms, a desire for the oppressed man or whatever to kick some ass and punch their way back into a society where they were unquestionably on top.
It’s fitting then how time has passed for fans from the late 90’s and 00’s while their younger counterparts have moved on from Tyler Durden to other supposedly counter-establishment figures like Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. As the original members of Project Mayhem have grown up, so too has Fight Club. And with “Fight Club 2” #1 from Dark Horse Comics, Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart explore the return of Tyler Durden to a world, and narrator, that lost the revolution.
“Fight Club 2” picks up roughly a decade after the initial film/movie. If you don’t care about whether or not Marla looks like Helena Bonham Carter, this could be a sequel to either version of the story. After the narrator (now going by Sebastian for convenience’s sake) has married Marla, had a child, and is working at some indiscriminate office job like he did before meeting Tyler Durden. In a lot of ways, he’s back to square one. Although instead of being a hungry twentysomething overcome with existential dread, he’s now approaching forty and a mid-life crisis. That’s been offset by nondescript pills, which allow him to keep Tyler at bay at the cost of his clarity. But when Marla, looking for the wild man who “fucked her back to life”, swaps out Sebastian’s pills for aspirin and placebos, Tyler Durden is free to make Project Mayhem bigger than ever.
Those pills actually contribute more to the book than functioning as a plot device. They also tie in the book’s aesthetic to the disparate tone of the book and film. The novel had the narrator telling a story from his view that could go off into tangents. That same narration utilized in the film, led to both being fairly surreal experiences. Now, in a medium that is 100% defined by its visual representation, Stewart finds an intriguing way to represent the fogged state of Sebastian’s mind. Pills and rose petals, like actual pills and rose petals, are sometimes spilled over the page covering dialogue and characters. It’s a bold choice, to lose one’s own art, but one that also furthers the notion that its hard to tell what’s real and what’s not for our protagonist.
Continued belowThat said, Cameron Stewart isn’t just using cheap tricks for the sake of a gimmick. In fact, he may just be doing the best work of his life. Stewart’s art – from my experience with it in works like “Seaguy” and “Thunderworld” often comes off as rather pop. He’s a master in vibrant visual storytelling and not the person you’d expect to tackle the dreary world of Fight Club. Yet, there’s a real sense of maturity in Stewart’s penciling that really elevates the book as a whole. Yes, there’s a lot of dull and dreary that comes with a pill-addled hero and his terrible marriage, but its offset by grand explosions of buildings, heads, and libidos. Stewart effortlessly navigates the archipelago of Sebastian/Durden’s mind with the dreary world its been plopped into. And, like the pills and roses, some of Durden’s craziness seems to seep into the real world, be it Durden himself through showing up in Sebastian’s video games or a support group ten times crazier than anything Meat Loaf could be a part of.
That elevated sense of crazy is something that “Fight Club 2” really has working for it. It does what all sequels should do by going further than the first story while staying rooted in what made that initial story work. That said, “Fight Club” sacrifices some of its believability for the grander sense of scale. Without spoiling anything, Durden’s actions here will frankly piss off the people who didn’t get how he and Ed Norton were the same guy in the first one. And those who wanted more of shirtless parking lot brawls might not appreciate the sequel’s more introspective side. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, “Fight Club” has grown up. It’s still about violence, but more so about the consequences of violence. How it could impact your children, your marriage. How, if you make one slip, it can find its way roaring back into your life and destroy everything you tried to build.
The pills don’t sound so bad after all, actually.
Final Verdict: 9.2 – “Fight Club 2” #1 is not only a sequel that’s ready to adapt to a different time than its predecessor, but translate masterfully into an entirely different medium. While it may not retain the broken-teeth impact of the original novel/film/t-shirt, it does continue the dialogue for those who want to keep talking about Fight Club past the catchphrases of the first story.
