‘Fight Club 3’: Chuck Palahniuk Breaks His Own Rules To Talk About New Graphic Novel From Dark Horse

Magical picture frames, Nazis, a sexually-transmitted virus, non-consensual plastic surgery, janky bear costumes, and so much more collide in the trilogy capper to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club universe. After its 12-issue Dark Horse run last year, the entirety of Fight Club 3 is arriving via a snazzy new hardcover collection this coming Wednesday, April 15.

With an introduction from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh, the direct sequel to 2016’s Fight Club 2 finds the unnamed character of the original novel (now calling himself “Balthazar”) teaming up with his destructive alter ego, Tyler Durden, in order to confront the spread of a venereal disease that would put gonorrhea to shame.

If you thought FC2 was crazy, then you ain’t seen nothing yet because the third installment is a raging whirlwind of surrealism and pitch black humor.

Project Mayhem has been rechristened “Rize or Die” in this adventure, but the creative team behind the Fight Club comic book mythos stays the same. Palahniuk serves as writer, Cameron Stewart is on interior artwork, and David Mack brings the cover and chapter break art. Nate Piekos (letterer) and Dave McCaig (colorist) round out the talented bunch.

To learn more about this project, I spoke with Chuck via email—a very high honor when you consider that the first two rules of Fight Club are...well, you know.

Josh Weiss: Fight Club 3 considerably amps up the surreality of Fight Club 2. Was it always the plan to go nuts for the third entry?

Chuck Palahniuk: Always play to the strengths of your medium. One advantage of the still image is that it can be examined. Compare that to film. Only so many elements can go into a film shot: a couple good faces, a prop, that’s all a viewer can catch in the fleeting moment. In books, such detail fares worse. 

All prose bogs down with too much static description. But in comics, you can indulge in Little Nemo in Dreamland levels of detail, and your reader can appreciate it all. This begs the writer to fill big “splash” pages with as much outlandish, delightful imagery as possible. As a child, I could fall into such pages and live there. I lived in Prince Valiant and Tales from the Crypt. Now, as a writer, I still can. The comic medium grows your imagination.

JW: You re-teamed with Cameron Stewart and David Mack for this project. What did you want their artwork to convey this time around?

CP: The magic of working with Cameron and David is that the former can convey any physical situation. No one depicts action, gesture, facial expression, AND body language better than Cameron. In that way, Cameron carries the “realistic” earthly storyline. David’s work suggests the subconscious to me. David’s is the Jungian side of the story. They complement each other perfectly.

JW: What excited you most about the main character finally teaming up with Tyler Durden?

CP: I’ve never bought into the binary dynamic of protagonist versus antagonist. Most people, to my way of thinking, create their own obstacles and defeats. God knows I do. Rather than watch Tom and Jerry, or Heckle and Jeckle, or the Coyote and Roadrunner battle endlessly, I wanted to return Balthazar and Tyler to the friendship they had before they’d become foes. 

JW: I’m curious where the idea of the magical picture frame came from. What’s the origin of that?

CP: Thank you for asking this one. My sister is a photographer and lives in a small, beachfront town that hosts regular art shows. Local painters and shutterbugs exhibit and sell their work. But many of the buyers only want a cheap way to obtain expensive mattes and frames. They’ll pay ten dollars for a painting with two hundred dollars worth of framing and mounting, then discard the painting and exhibit their own work, using the frame, at the next art show. 

Rival small town artists are constantly buying and destroying each other’s work simply for the legitimacy that a decent frame bestows. Marcel Duchamp couldn’t craft a better example of how context creates the value of art. On a tangent, a local framer told me of a heist at a famous gallery in Madrid. The thieves cut the antique paintings from their frames and made off with the canvases while leaving behind the actual treasure. 

The paintings were minor works by obscure artists, but the frames had been priceless. In my imagination, all of these factors combined to suggest a picture frame with the ability to make any picture a masterpiece, and what the history of that frame would possibly be. Whether I’m using a non-fiction form to tell an outlandish story, or using the wrong word in a sentence, deliberately, most of my work is an experiment in storytelling context.

JW: Are you getting a strange sense of déjà vu with today’s pandemic since a virus factors heavily into the plot of Fight Club 3?

CP: And thank you for broaching this aspect of the story. Two years ago, I was eating breakfast with [Fight Club] director David Fincher, trying to sell him an idea for a sexually transmitted pandemic that no one would discuss openly. I guess timing is everything. Is it too soon to make a “Pandemic in the Disco!” joke? 

Regardless, during every deep crisis, society has clung to a comfort story. During the Depression people bonded over Scarlett O’Hara and her struggle to survive poverty. 

During my childhood in the stagflation, energy crisis, social meltdown of the 1970s, we attached to The Waltons and stared at them on television while they stared at their radio. It’s people watching people watching people watching stuff. Even as we go online and watch John-Boy Walton, we’ll still want a story that will help us acclimate to the trauma of COVID-19. I just hope I’m not jumping the gun. 

JW: Is this the end of the Fight Club story, or are you planning more tales set in this universe?

CP: The Fight Club world has always been about our ability to be with conflict. Writers are particularly conflict-adverse, which is why they present their work from such a distance. [It’s also] why so many student writers avoid creating conflict in their work. They’ve been traumatized by battling parents or neighborhoods or world events, so their early work tends to be flat and free of tension. 

Fight Club is a baby-steps, structured, mutually consensual method for those traumatized people to explore their own power and endurance. And as a story about conflict, it will eventually have to tackle the biggest conflict in all of creation. The conflict that gave birth to all conflicts.

JW: If there are more stories coming, what can you tease about them?

CP: The original book of Fight Club began as seemingly unrelated short stories. Once I recognized the themes and characters that those stories held in common, I could unite them as a novel. Likewise, the next phase of the Fight Club graphic novel series is going to bring together some very dissimilar parts of my overall work. 

Everything in the world has become so divided and contentious, like my parents during my childhood. Like the world since my birth, despite all the hippy-dippy calls for peace. Much of my writing has been about either my mother or my father, so future projects will be about recreating my family. Or, a family. But the greatest joy in eventually learning to create intense conflict and tension in writing is to generate the enormous joy and relief that occurs when you resolve a career full of built-up tension.

JW: You touched on this earlier, but what have you enjoyed most about being able to explore the world of Fight Club through the medium of comics?

CP: The key word is “most”. There’s so much to enjoy. The on-going process of collaboration is a joy, you’re always reviewing art, coloring, lettering. A daily task that goes on for years. The promotion is a pleasure, also, to meet the generally good-hearted comics readers in the shared chaos of a convention. That’s compared to the steeplechase of a traditional book tour, where the author is constantly alone except for rushed book signings. But my greatest enjoyment comes from the greatest challenge: Plotting the story. How do you surprise readers with each page turn? In comics, a writer is forced to create a strong plot point every two pages. 

That means a single, thin issue will have more set-ups, pay-offs, and reversals than most 300-page novels. To draw a parallel, as I do masonry work, I marvel at the heavy stones I could lift fifteen years ago. I see such stones set perfectly high in a wall and wonder how I had the strength to place them. In comics, I’m so confronted by the challenge of plotting, that I transcend any idea of my limitations. It’s the challenge that goads me to imagine moments that will, later, shock and impress me with the question: “Who wrote that?” Such ecstasy beats anything I’ve ever felt in a church.