‘Fight Club’ Sequel to Be Published as Comic Book Series Next Year
Nearly a decade after Fight Club blew minds and established strict “no talking” rules, author Chuck Palahniuk is working a sequel that will be published in May 2015 as a 10-issue comic book series for Dark Horse Comics, USA Today reports.
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Illustrated by Cameron Stewart, Fight Club 2 will pick up 10 years after the events of the first book: The unnamed narrator is now married to Marla Singer and struggling to be a good father to their nine-year-old son, Junior. And of course, good ol’ Tyler Durden is back, with Palahniuk promising to examine the character’s true origins: “Tyler is something that maybe has been around for centuries and is not just this aberration that’s popped into [the narrator’s] mind.”
Other characters from the 1996 novel — which David Fincher adapted into a movie in 1999 — will also return, as will the organized 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. “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.”
Stewart said he chose a “cartoony” drawing style for Fight Club 2 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 follow-up “is as much a meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to Fight Club as it is a sequel.”
While the original Fight Club was a screed against fathers, Palahniuk says the new comic book series deals with similar themes, but from the perspective of a middle-aged man. “Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father’s perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that,” he said.
Palahniuk admitted he did not intend to continue the Fight Club story, but began to toss around the idea as he grew more enamored with the comic-book community in Portland, Oregon, and especially after he tripped over his tongue at last year’s Comic-Con in New York City: “I messed up and said I was doing the sequel in front of 1,500 geeks with telephones,” Palahniuk said. “Suddenly, there was this big scramble to honor my word.”