Fight Club 2 #1
Script by THE ORIGINAL WRITER Chuck Palahniuk
Art by Cameron Stewart
Colors by Dave Stewart
Letters by Nate Peikos of Blambot
Cover by David Mack
Review by Joey Braccino
LOOK AT HIM.
HE CALLS HIMSELF SEBASTIAN THESE DAYS.
“Remember Fight Club?”
Asked no one ever because if you don’t know Fight Club, then how the hell are you supposed to roll your eyes at all those inane, asinine “The First Rule of Fight Club” jokes that jocks and jerks and geeks and nerds of all sexes, races, and Generation X/Y/Z’s throw around each and every time somebody foolishly brings up Fight Club?
“Have you read Fight Club?”
Now that’s a different question, and one that many will probably answer in the negative, because who the f**k reads (said the English teacher)?
Chuck Palahniuk returns to the world of our nameless narrator (played by Ed Norton) Sebastian as we left it at the end of the ground-breaking, critically-acclaimed, name-making, anti-consumerism, anarchic 1996 novel, Fight Club. Of course, 1996’s Fight Club became 1999’s David Fincher flick Fight Club, which starred Brad Pitt’s abs, Meat Loaf, and the cigarette(s) in Helena Bonham Carter’s hand. But who cares about that Fight Club, man; Fight Club 2 is the sequel to Fight Club 1, or rather, the original Fight Club (1996 novel).
[Did I mention Fight Club?]
Any sort of recap is embedded in distant, detached, disillusioned, disorienting narrative captions told to us in the pointed, aggressive, flippant, dulcet tones of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), which is actually super irrelevant because Sebastian, our narrator, is so immensely under the influence of anti-psychotic medication prescribed by insidery psychologists that the narrative captions themselves are covered in actual pills. Not actual pills, mind you, but illustrated pills that are actually overlaying the actual captions, masking their meaning and blocking the words, because Sebastian is psychotic and delusional and has split-personalities and the pills are supposed to make you feel psychotic because your reading a comic book sequel to what you think is/was a film you liked when you were a teenager but is actually the sequel to a book you never read.
And Sebastian is a father now and Marla is a mother. They’re a family together with a weird little kid obsessed with explosives. And the babysitter has a knife. And life in the suburbs is exactly all the khakis and IKEA bulls**t and cellphones and smelling the roses and church that you were promises.
And man is this book weird. Heads blow up.
And sex.
And no sex.
And fire. Lots of fire. RIZE OR DIE, they said and spraypainted all over the book because DURDEN IS REAL and Sebastian is like “I’m not me.”
And none of it makes sense to the point that all of it makes sense and it’s really impressive that Palahniuk is able to adapt his distinct post-modern storytelling writing style to the comics medium, allowing for the gaps in logic and space and psychology that his prose is able to achieve. And it’s also impressive that Cameron Stewart, who f**king writes Batgirl and illustrated Brubaker’s Catwoman over a decade ago can make such pulpy naturalism so utterly brutal and disturbing
And Marla visits a support group to escape Sebastian, her husband, but Sebastian finds her and it’s all weird and it’s about how as you get older you die, but you don’t die because you’re old, you metaphysically die because you give up on living.
So do something.
Verdict
This is normally where I say BUY, but that would feel oddly anti-this-book and hypocritical, but you really should “ACQUIRE THIS BOOK THROUGH MONETARY MEANS” because it’s really something different and yet exactly what you want from a Fight Club book now that you’re older and probably in a state of stagnation.
Read this book because you didn’t read the original book. You just watched a movie and gave money to Fox.
RIZE OR DIE.
