It’s been almost two years since Chuck Palahniuk first announced that he would be creating a sequel to Fight Club, and that it would be in comic book form. Since then, a lot has changed: ISIS. The ebola epidemic. Worldwide puzzlement over the Malaysian Airlines disappearance, an event that surprisingly didn’t begin life as a Chuck Palahniuk story. But one thing that hasn’t changed during all that time is the plot description of Fight Club 2, whose first issue of a ten-part series hits stores today. The New York Post reports that the story unfolds much as the author explained it would in 2013: having moved to the suburbs and settled down, the unnamed narrator and wife Marla are now a boring middle-aged couple. You know, just how you assumed they would become after the end of the original story.
Marla again seems to be the trigger for the emergence of the Tyler Durden persona: “Bored, Marla begins swapping out her husband’s antipsychotic meds with a placebo in hopes that his anarchic alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt in the film), will return.” Palahniuk himself seems to suggest this new adventure will be a full-throated rejection of contemporary suburban lifestyles. “The story is about not having to conform to all those sedate, mundane, bland stereotypes [of being middle-aged in the suburbs]. You can live a life beyond that,” he says. So, basically the equivalent of every car commercial you’ve ever seen, message-wise.
The comic itself also encourages readers to get involved—or, in the parlance of the story, to “guerrilla market the shit” out of the series. It tells readers to submit photos using the phrases “Tyler lives” or “Rize or die” in creative ways. The former will obviously be easy for people named Tyler, whereas the latter phrase seems geared solely toward fans of David LaChapelle documentaries. This new sequel is also not to be confused with the short story prequel Palahniuk recently wrote, and which is also available for purchase. Now you can get all the excitement of everything that happens to the main character before and after that book and/or movie you like, as long as you don’t mind not getting to watch Brad Pitt act it out.