Coloring Books Palahniuk Style
It may seem we’ve seen every possible variation on the adult coloring book, including the weird offshoot, “relaxing” swear word coloring books.
But trust Chuck Palahniuk, the iconoclastic author of Fight Club, to bring a new twist to the genre, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required).
Bait: Off-Color Stories for You to Color by Chuck Palahniuk, illustrated by Duncan Fegredo, Lee Bermejo, and Joelle Jones (PRH/Dark Horse Books) is not a full coloring book but rather a series of eight short stories along with multiple illustrations that readers can color at will.
Palahniuk tells the paper that the idea grew out of his work on the Flight Club 2 comic book:
“I would go to the artists and suggest what I thought they could do with an image, and they would counter with an even more outrageous image … And I would go with an even more outrageous image, and we would have this back-and-forth race to the bottom until we agreed on a scandalous image that neither of us would have proposed in the first place.”
He hopes the coloring opportunity will appeal to his fan base, saying “So many of the readers I interact with are creative people themselves … I thought this would be a great way for them to participate in the project.”
Palahniuk enjoyed making Bait, telling the paper “I would love to do another coloring book every year for the rest of my life.”
He also says he has “most of Fight Club 3 written … [and] a graphic novel based on what would be the third book following the first two I’ve done about a dead little girl named Madison Spencer (Damned and Doomed). This would complete that story and it would kind of start a new franchise, but in graphic form.”
The stories in Bait he says are “about misplaced nurturance … They’re all about someone trying to save someone else, trying to rescue someone else, but in doing so, kind of destroying this person.”