December 18, 2002

By A.C. Thompson

DAVID REES'S SCATHING jet black humor is a salve to the atheist soul in these dark times. Rees, a 30-year-old New Yorker, produces Get Your War On, an online comic strip (www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html) populated by profanity-spewing office workers hysterically bantering about current – cataclysmic – events.

In a strip posted a few days after the United States launched air strikes against the Taliban, one deadpan cubicle-dweller tells another, "You know what I love? I love how we're dropping food aid packages into a country that's one big minefield. That's good." "Well, it turns the relief effort into a fun game for the Afghan people – a game called 'See if you have any fucking arms left to eat the food we dropped after you step on a land mine trying to retrieve it!' " responds the coworker. It's savage and hilarious and, most significant, given the vast number of bogus pronouncements coming out of the White House these days, real. (And the fact that Rees's characters are blank-faced people pulled from CD-ROMs of '70s-era clip art, makes the jokes that much funnier.)

Perhaps the public is tiring of President George W. Bush's bunk platitudes: according to press reports, Rees's lo-fi site has garnered some 25 million hits; the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek have done glowing profiles. In early December I spent an hour with Rees while he was in town promoting Get Your War On, a new book of strips published by Soft Skull Press.

ACT: Were the Situationists [a radical group of '60s artists] an influence? They were doing something similar – using other people's images and sticking in their own word bubbles.

DR: No. I have no idea who those people are. Frankly, I used to draw cartoons by hand, and it was always really time-consuming and messy.

Once I realized, while at a temp job, that I could just take the clip art that was on the computer and just copy and paste the clip art and that it would only take 10 seconds to do a whole comic strip, I was like, "I'm never going back to drawing a comic strip. Only a fool would do that."

ACT: In the comic you were dealing with the fear that the war in Afghanistan would be absolutely horrific. As it turns out, it wasn't as bloody as you expected.

DR: It's kind of awesome. Thousands of people didn't starve to death. You'd think I'd feel stupid, "Oh my god, it wasn't so bad. Why was I so dumb to think it would be so bad." So great, the worst-case scenario didn't come to pass. That's irrelevant. It could've happened, and nobody seemed to care.

ACT: Most political satire sucks. Most of it is really not very fucking funny. Why is that?

DR: Because a lot of it is not truly satirical – it's ideological. The thing that's most important to people who are producing that type of material is to convince people of a certain position. My comic isn't so much ideological as it is skeptical.

When I started making Get Your War On, I made it for myself. It was a journal. And some people find it very frustrating that I'm not towing an ideological line. Or, "Why is Voltron in the strip? What's that got to do with anything?" Or, "If you really wanted to convince people you wouldn't use so much profanity."

I always write back and say, "Listen man, it's clip art. Make your own strip."

ACT: What's fueling you at this point?

DR: A certain threshold has to be crossed for me to make a comic. I have to be sufficiently angry or frustrated.... For example, last Wednesday I turned on the TV and saw fucking Henry Kissinger standing with George W. Bush. I was just in such shock to see Kissinger involved in the Sept. 11 investigation. So I made a page of strips about him.

ACT: What are your thoughts about the looming war with Iraq?