Check Out Exclusive Artwork From ‘Fight Club 2’ Comic
Chuck Palahniuk will continue the saga of the unnamed narrator and his lifelong pal Tyler Durden when Fight Club 2 sees publication this May as a 10-issue comic book series for Dark Horse. The illustrations are provided by comic book stalwart Cameron Stewart, whose Fight Club 2 artwork is now available to preview exclusively via Rolling Stone.
With a water color pallet that strikes a balance been bright and muted, artist David Mack’s cover captures the schizophrenic essence of Palahniuk’s 1996 novel (and David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation) Fight Club, depicting a pair of wide open eyes hovering above a face whose lids remain closed.
The rest of the issue, however, is drawn by Stewart in a much more traditional comic book style. The other images offer a peak at the new life of the anonymous hero, who now goes by the name Sebastian. As the panels show, the former leader, once destined for greatness and immortality, is now a prescription-pill-popping drone — but an encounter with a battered florist shows his past isn’t done with him yet.
Upon the official announcement of Fight Club 2 last year, Stewart said he had chosen a “cartoony” drawing style as a way to capture the density of the story, as well as some of its more “absurdly comical moments.” He added that he felt the sequel “is as much a meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to Fight Club as it is a sequel.”
Palahniuk first revealed he was working on a follow-up to his 1996 novel — which David Fincher adapted into a movie in 1999 — during a panel at Comic-Con in 2013. Fight Club 2 picks up a decade after the events of the first book, and finds the anonymous narrator married to Marla Singer and struggling to be a good father to his nine-year-old son. Tyler Durden will, of course, also return, and Palahniuk hinted at an exploration of the character’s true origins, suggesting he’s much more than an “aberration that’s popped into [the narrator’s] mind.”
Other characters from Fight Club will also return, as well as the beloved basement brawls and the anarchist movement, Project Mayhem, which still has a hold on the narrator. “He tries to go back and reclaim that phase of his life, and is just a pathetic failure,” Palahniuk said last year. “He’s not that person anymore. But beyond that, it’s what the organization has grown into in his absence and what he’s pulled back into.”