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?ĬP: And thank you for broaching this aspect of the story. Two years ago, I was eating breakfast with 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?

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. 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. What’s the origin of that?ĬP: 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. JW: I’m curious where the idea of the magical picture frame came from. JW: What excited you most about the main character finally teaming up with Tyler Durden?ĬP: 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.

Fight club graphic novel