Fight Club 2 #3 Review

Written by: Chuck Palahniuk

Art by: Cameron Stewart

Publisher: Dark Horse

Issue #3 brings us the long awaited return to Project Mayhem and the infiltration into the world of space monkeys.

One again, Fight Club 2 contains a brilliant rehash of previous important information to re-inform the reader of major points from the previous issue to get you right back into the story. Considering these are made up of nothing more than a singular sentence or phrase and a small picture, I’m pretty stunned at how well the information manages to get passed. I hope other creators take note because this is an effective way to get the info across without needing to rely on paragraphs full of information the reader might not even remember. And, as I’m a terrible with names, it’s refreshing to see an approach that doesn’t require me to exactly remember who person A is and where the hell area B is.

That being said, this rocket ship into space is sure to leave the reader with some conflicted feelings about camping out on porches and shaving your head.

Back when Fight Club released, Tyler Durden’s plan looked more like the kind of world a young anarchist envisioned on their way to dismantle capitalism. Full of quotes of how our things owned us, how we needed to stop being our f***ing khakis, and how corporate advertisements were creating unbelievable visions of men, the plans Tyler carried out often involved seemingly harmful things like destroying empty coffee shops, sending kids to college, and wiping out all debt. Sure, these plans often involved violent threats and a whole bunch of bombs/nitroglycerin; but they were usually empty threats and done during times that not a single person was inside these buildings.

We could all make the argument that Project Mayhem was ultimately a just cause to help us all reevaluate the boring routines of our lives in which we looked forward to buying new couches and ironing our button ups. After all, wasn’t that the point of the story? If everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy, how long is it until the drones start flying away?

However, Chuck Palahniuk has taken the time in between the two stories to give us both a realistic and rather frightening look at the implications of a world where Tyler Durden goes unchecked which is making Fight Club 2 one of my favorite sequels of all time.

The dialogue has remained the same and fans will be happy to return to Paper Street.

Palahniuk has expertly crafted Project Mayhem into even more of a type of twisted cult in which Tyler has gotten more extreme and youth seem even more lost. Weaving in Joseph Campbell theories, existentialist ideas, and common fears of young adults; Palakniuk creates an eerily believable reason for Tyler to have so many followers as well as why Tyler finds it so easy to exploit them.

What’s even more interesting is how these space monkeys (which is what the young men joining Tyler or trying to join Tyler are called) are still given enough depth in their small interactions with Sebastian that we can actually feel sorry for them. We see young men playing video games, addicts clearly going through withdrawals, and muscular men handing out unnecessary comments about the human body. In a way, this is giving us insight into the varying levels of escapism that everyone sought before deciding Project Mayhem might just be their last resort and you can’t help but feel a little sad at the implications. Or, as Palahniuk himself writes, these men have suddenly found themselves in a world where they have no teachers to please and no masters to apprentice for and simply don’t know where to go.

That being said, this issue finally clues us in to just how dangerous Tyler has become as well as how huge Project Mayhem has gotten. It was easy to believe that this Tyler might just be a Tyler who was still happy blowing up credit card buildings and make soap but the truth is way, way beyond small plots like that. And it’s even more frightening to see that Sebastian himself needs to go deeper into this world to save his son who seems more and more like a physical manifestation of the fight between Sebastian’s struggle of keeping his own sanity and fully giving in to Tyler’s deranged ways.

Cameron Stewart is once again wonderful and I’m happy to see some of the messy panels make a return. In this issue we have a few pages in which Stewart chooses to use evasive art (such as blood spatter or screams) to take over other panels which is such a perfect technique for this story. It makes panels unreadable by all means, but it also helps cement the madness within Sebastian’s mind and makes for an interesting stylistic choice when the alternative is showcasing extreme violence.

If any Fight Club fans have yet to get into the series over fears that this sequel can’t do the original justice, this third issue is enough for me to say that literally every single fear can be buried. It’s still violent, it still has something to say, and Tyler Durden is still creating deranged plots. It’s just that this time around we know enough to understand that life has enough mayhem on its own without threatening strangers with murder if they don’t graduate college. Even Alex finally grew up in A Clockwork Orange. It’s time for Sebastian/Tyler to do the same or die trying.