Fight Club 2: Chuck Palahniuk sequel is a 'meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to the original'

Sequel will find "Jack" in a midlife crisis of sorts

Is that what a man looks like? Fatherhood will be a central theme once more (20th Century Fox)

Some interesting details on the sequel to Fight Club have been revealed by author Chuck Palahniuk and illustrator Cameron Stewart, with the graphic novel centring on the narrator during a midlife crisis.

Ahead of a Comic Con panel he will front with Fight Club director David Fincher on Saturday, Palahniuk opened up about what we can expect from the next instalment to USA Today.

The publication reports that the 10-issue Dark Horse Comics maxiseries will take place alternately in the future and the past, finding the protagonist/narrator married to Marla Singer and with a nine-year-old son named Junior whom he is failing just as his father did him.

Fatherhood will again be central to the story but seen from a new perspective, with Palahniuk saying that the original book was "such a tirade against fathers — everything I had thought my father had not done combined with everything my peers were griping about their fathers.

"Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father's perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that."

We will also learn more about the origins of Tyler Durden.

"Tyler is something that maybe has been around for centuries and is not just this aberration that's popped into his mind," he added.

Project Mayhem is expect to resurface in the book too, along with one more (failed) fight club meeting.

"He [narrator] tries to go back and reclaim that phase of his life, and is just a pathetic failure," Palahniuk said. "He's not that person anymore. But beyond that, it's what the organization has grown into in his absence and what he's pulled back into."

While the author focused on the plot, Stewart gave some indication of the tone of the story, interestingly noting how it responds to the success of the movie adaptation of the book.

"[It is] as much a meta-fictional comment on the cultural response to Fight Club as it is a sequel," he said.

Fight Club 2 is expected in May 2015.