I know this because I paid $3.99 to know…this? Dang, that almost worked.
Fight Club 2 #1
Chuck Palahniuk, Cameron Stewart, Dave Stewart, Nate Piekos
Dark Horse $3.99
The original Fight Club film came out during the point in my life where I was very much an angry white boy in his late teens who loved him some nu-metal. Hot Topic was more than happy to sell all sorts of FC merchandise, the DVD had some sweet features, and I was more than happy to drop my disposable income on all of it. It was a movie I was super into for about 6 months, but quickly distanced myself from when I met other fans who were equally, if not as obnoxious about it as I was. I’m still found of the movie, my tastes of music remains questionable to this date, but I haven’t give much thought to Fight Club until talks of a sequel emerged.
When Fight Club 2 was announced, I was conflicted at first. On one hand, Chuck Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart are one hell of a creative team to be working on any comic. On the other hand, was there a need for a Fight Club 2? I never read the novel (I know, I suck), but I thought the movie wrapped up things quite nicely and didn’t need a follow up. I was hesitant to pick it up, but decided to anyway, because I love my reader(s) and I’m not very good with money. Well that and Cameron Stewart has been killing it over on Batgirl and I genuinely like Palhniuk’s work. At the very worst, I would be out of $4, which I would have blown on a beer or something.
Fight Club 2 #1 is a merciless read. It does very little recap, and assumes everyone is more than familiar with the source material. Of course with a the number 2 in a title, I guess assuming everyone is on the same page is to be expected, but you figured someone would throw a bone to the uninitiated (Decompression comics has ruined me). But props to Palhniuk for not caring about if you’re new or not, he’s obviously here to tell a story, not get new readers. Issue one is a very unique comic. Parts of it feel very immature, and the 19 year old me would have loved the “Me against the world, wake up sheeple, pills are killing us” aspect of this comic, completely unaware of it’s satire or not. Present day Chris is rolling his eyes at it at times, but it possibly being satire makes this comic extremely fascinating, with some crazy over the top twists that genuinely caught me off guard. Fight Club 2 is super clever at times, or so confident in it’s stupidity that it buys into it’s own hype all too well. I can’t actually tell which scenario plays out when, and that itself is strangely wonderful.
While the quality of Palahniuk’s writing is subjective, the quality of Cameron Stewart’s art is not. Stewart, alongside letter Nate Piekos, really help the readers realize that Sebastian/Tyler Durden is a bit of a hot mess when it comes to his mental health with some really smart placement of panels, word balloons and sound effects. It’s an incredibly well-crafted comic on the art side of things, and it does wonders for the script. Cameron’s stylistic art looks fantastic, especially when colored by Dave Stewart, much how like the movie was full of pretty people doing awful things. It’s easily worth the price of admission just to bear witness to this team drawing a great looking book and tell the story in such a unique way.
Fight Club 2 is ultimately a comic full of terrible people doing various terrible things. It’s definitely not for everyone (there’s some material from 1999 that doesn’t fly in 2015) and at no point within these 20 pages does it justify it’s existence, aside from the art. That being said, it’s either brilliant satire, or a hot outdated mess, which means it’s not good enough for me to buy on a monthly basis, but it’s something I’ll buy collected to find out. It definitely managed to elicited some emotions from me I haven’t felt in awhile, but I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.
