Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Wasted on Fight Club



Cameron Stewart is a terrific comic artist, and has spent a lot of time recently doing work on Fight Club comic, which is a terrible shame, because the comic is really, really awful.

Driven by some lingering affection for the original book and movie, I got the first sequel and it had a pleasant anything-goes attitude for a while there, but unfortunately, where it went was right up its own arse.

By the end, Chuck Pahulniak is suggesting that anybody who read the original Fight Club book was incredibly obsessed with it, or incredibly opposed to it - there was just no room for most people, who just found it okay - and the second comic series, which recently wrapped up, was just offensively dull.

It's a terrible shame that it's so unreadable, because Stewart's art is amazing. It's as clear and energetic as it ever was, and he's doing some really incredible stuff with panel subversion, and there are some freaky sense-of-depth effects and some playful and lively character work.

But good art only goes so far, and it only goes as far as Pahulniak's ego allows it. I can only hope that Stewart got a decent payday (maybe there are more of those obsessives than I assume), because nobody else is really getting anything out of it.

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