Comic Review: Fight Club 2 #1- It’s a New Tyler World Order

Script: Chuck Palahniuk
Art: Cameron Stewart
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 27th May 2015


I often say this, but my experience of comic book fans is that they are the most asleep to reality people that I have ever met.

It’s a generalisation, but the comic book fans that I have interacted with are not exactly big fans of reality and truth. “Comics are supposed to be fun man, stop being so serious man, nobody wants to hear about all of that boring ‘conspiracy’ stuff.”

I can see the comic book crowd reading Fight Club 2 #1 as something that is ‘cool.’ Cool because men are in a secret fighting club, and the art has flower petals and pills that hides some of the dialogue. Cool because it has nostalgia value, and cool because it has a girl inappropriately talking about sex with a group of old looking (Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome) kids in it.

Edgy man, sick man, so cool man, yeah man, really cool, just like the movie. The problem is that the people saying ‘cool’ are probably the least cool people in the world today. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Comic book fans are not cool. I’m not cool. Cool is for the young, and comic book readers are far from being young. If you are young and reading comics, sorry, I have bad news for you. You aren’t cool, and you’re reading stuff that is designed for old blokes like me.

People prefer to spend their lives trying to find something that is cool, rather than searching for the truth. Writers know that, so they try to give their readers what they are so desperate for, but can never actually attain. They can try and be clever and give readers some truth within that all-elusive cool, but what can they do when people are completely indifferent to truth?

The original Fight Club movie was about male emasculation caused by corporate, capitalistic compromise, and how men are unsatisfied because of the unnatural ways they are forced to live their lives. It was about the corporatisation of humanity, how everything has become monetised, but nothing has any real spiritual value. It was about the search for meaning, in a world that offers spectacle over truth.

A lot of people missed that of course. What they will remember is soap, Brad Pitt shirtless and sweaty, cool dialogue and a twist at the end with cool explosives. Message lost, and the world continues much the same way as before.

Which brings me nicely to that new Avengers movie? It was bloody terrible, wasn’t it? And do you know why it was terrible, why it left you with a feeling of emptiness in your soul? It was because it was all spectacle and attempts at being cool, with no heart, with no reality and zero truth.

I should be fair to the people of today, because it’s always been this way. The world changes, ‘cool’ changes, but humanity is still stuck in the same old rut of the past 2000+ years. I want to mention the Bible for a minute. Don’t worry, this won’t take long, and I really need to make this point clear.

Jesus said that he was the truth, the only way (John 4:16- Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”) And what do people do? They set up a divide and conquer religion and completely miss his message. His message was that you have to fall in love with truth. He sacrificed his life as an example to us all, his life being about the adoration of the father, the father being moral truth.

What is moral truth? How do I get it? How do I fall in love with it?

Remember all of that stuff about not murdering and lying and stealing and being horrible to people? Remember, do unto others as you would have done unto yourself? That’s moral truth. That’s the goal, that’s what Christianity should be about, that’s what life itself should be about, but isn’t.

Jesus wanted people to love truth more than anything else, but the message was lost, and thus Christianity, a moral philosophy that is supposed to be based on an adoration of truth became just another government sponsored control system.

How bloody sad is that? It’s an indictment of how determined we all are to ignore truth.

And so back to this book, a comic book sequel to a sixteen-year old movie about empty consumerism and living the hollow western capitalistic half-life. A movie that had a strong moral truth at it’s core, a truth that people completely ignored and carried on living their lives exactly as they had done before seeing the movie.

Do you see what I mean? Offer truth, and it gets ignored, every single time. People take the surface glitter, ignore the core, and the world continues to spin, exactly as before.

Do you remember that movie? Do you remember the main guy, the boring bloke? Fight Club 2 #1 opens with him. His name is Sebastian, he’s married, and the cool Brad Pitt character has disappeared. This Sebastian guy’s life has turned into nothing. Married, with a young child and drugged by big pharma, his wife misses the good old days with Tyler, and I don’t blame her. Most people compromise, and at least this book is realistic in that it shows this shallow, hollow, empty compromise suburban nothing life played out into boring middle age.

Unfortunately that makes most of this first issue a bit dull, you get the cool jokes of an adult nature, but they seem blunt now in these days of full frontal graphic horribleness on our Game of Thrones idiot boxes. The book started to bore me, the cool wasn’t enough, it was old cool, Dad cool, not the cool that it used to be, but the cool that it still wants to be, but can never reclaim. The book isn’t quite embarrassing Dad dancing bad, but it’s not the cool that it once was. The panels feel like old re-treads (therapy group jokes, bruised waiters waving the bill) and it needs to do something new to be relevant to the world as it is today.

I was about to give up on it, but then as it concludes, something happens. The Dad dancing stops, Tyler Durden returns, and he’s seems….different.

I didn’t quite get what he was from the main book. I knew he was supposed to be different, he looks different, but I didn’t get it. On a first read he just appeared to be a wild and crazy old (imaginary) friend, perhaps involved in international arms trading, who was going to make the boring protagonist live a bit. But there’s an added section to the book titled, ‘Chaos Report,’ and it does a fantastic job of explaining who this new Tyler is.

Okay then, here is the bit that most people will miss. Tyler Durden now represents a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) that is sent into foreign countries by the new world order to start revolutions, cause chaos and make sure that foreign governments do what they are told by the western banking elites. Vladimir Putin announced new laws a couple of days ago that are designed to stop these NGO groups from messing around in Russia, and the west isn’t very pleased about it, for obvious reasons.

‘Putin has frequently named NGOs as a threat to national security. “Western special services continue their attempts at using public, non-governmental and politicised organisations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilise the internal situation in Russia,” Putin told senior officials of the federal security service in March. “They are already planning their actions for the upcoming election campaigns of 2016-18.”’ 
(Guardian newspaper article 19th May 2015)


These NGO’s often hide their true purposes under the umbrella of being ‘charitable organisations’ (like ‘Human Rights Watch’ and ‘Amnesty International’). The vast number of their members think they are doing good things, helping out the homeless etc, but in reality they are controlled by western intelligence agencies, and exist only to maintain corporate western hegemony. If you want an assassination done, a bomb planted or a revolution started (see the Ukraine right now) then the NGO’s act as an entry point to help you get the job done. Putin understands that, as does the writer of this book, Mr. Chuck Palahniuk.

Tyler Durden, the Brad Pitt character, is now the head of a NGO called Project Mayhem, but what is his long-term goal? Is he an independent operator looking to create his own New World Disorder, or is he helping to bring in the long planned (and real-world) New World Order?

Is Tyler a dusty old totalitarian communist type, or a freedom hungry (from governmental slave masters) anarchist?

Are any real world truths going to be revealed to the comic book reading audience, or is this just a middle life crisis book about one bored bloke and his chaos loving alter ego?

Is it going to tackle the real world issues of 2015, or simply ignore them like so many other contemporary comic books? We’ll see. So far they mentioned Spain, and the collapse of the Euro, so it’s a decent start, but we’ll have to wait and see how far it dares to go. No ‘conspiracy’ theories are necessary, the facts alone will do.

The original Fight Club movie felt real, it felt like it was saying something, but it was set in a time before 9/11, before the war on terror, before the modern age of mass government surveilance and endless wars based on lies. This sequel is set in a very different time. How far will it dare to go? Will it seek truth, or middle aged nostalgia cool? Will it point a spotlight on what is happening in the world today? Will it tell the truth, or will it compromise and just try to tell a funny, cool and entertaining story?

Time will tell, and would anybody notice the truth when they see it anyway? History teaches us that truth will stare us in the face, and shout until it makes our ears bleed, but still, the sleeping face of humanity will fail to see what is directly in front of it. The sad fact of the matter is that people don’t see, not because they are stupid, but because they don’t want to see. Life is easier that way, and the search for cool always wins out over the search for truth, especially when it comes to the world of comic books.

So, bearing this in mind, I hope that Chuck goes for it. Dump reality over our head Chuck. Engulf us in a tidal wave of truth. Most people won’t even notice. Give the comic book fans their ‘cool’ bits, tell us that the suburbs are a bit boring, treat us to a punch up and explosion every now and then, and I think you’ll just about get away with it.


Rating: 7/10 (Not that exciting so far, but it has promise)



Link to article quoted in this review:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/19/russia-bans-undesirable-international-organisations-2016-elections