Clip Artist David Rees Still Has His War On

"I didn’t plan to make Get Your War On," cartoonist David Rees tells me over coffee a few blocks from his Park Slope apartment. "I was gonna update my website for Fighting Technique and Filing Technique, but at the time we had just started bombing Afghanistan, it was a month after the World Trade Center attacks and it seemed like updating my regular, apolitical comics would be really stupid."

I shouldn’t really call Rees a cartoonist–satirist is more accurate. "Cartoonists" draw, Rees mostly uses clip art. I discovered his earlier work, a photocopy zine entitled My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, a couple years back. Fighting Technique was the product of tedium (a temp job in a windowless basement at Citicorp, he reveals), an absurd postmodern mix of karate clip art, simple graphics and profanity that at first scanned as woefully stupid, but became progressively funnier as I turned the pages.

"I like clip art that’s really just banal," Rees says. "If you just scan it, you can’t tell what’s going on. One of the reasons the strip worked: the imagery was so boring but the language was so extreme."

Since 2001, Rees’ cartoons have evolved from radical silliness to topical satire. Inspired equally by current events and the aftermath of 9/11, his online strip Get Your War On generated enough buzz to warrant (among other things) publication as a softcover compilation, a book tour and a New York Times profile. Not bad for a bunch of clip-art office workers cursing up a storm.

As a reader of his early strips, I have to ask whether the swear-laden speech patterns were at all inspired by bad dubbing, especially considering that his first comic, Fighting Technique, involved karate fighters.

"People ask me if it’s supposed to sound like dubbing," he answers, "and that was not a conscious influence. I was never into kung-fu culture, I just thought it would be fun to see if I could find karate clip art. For GYWO I decided to ‘go with what you know,’ which is clip art...profanity... Looking back on Fighting Technique, the profanity really gives you a sense of the characters’ anxiety. For GYWO that was obviously the perfect device."

GYWO

At a time when most people were afraid to voice any reservations about America’s response to 9/11 (hell, some people were afraid to even leave the house), Rees managed almost unintentionally to air out contrary thoughts in a public forum (the strip’s earliest publicity was strictly word-of-mouth). In one of the earliest GYWO comics, an office worker ironically exclaims, "Oh my God, this War On Terrorism is gonna rule! I can’t wait until the war is over and there’s no more terrorism!" His friend concurs, "I know! Remember when we declared a War On Drugs and now you can’t buy drugs anymore?"

In the Times profile, John Leland commented that Rees’ characters "flaunted baser instincts" while "the nation put forward its higher virtues." Rees himself, in characteristically polite fashion, begs to differ. "John Leland was a perfectly nice guy and I’m glad that he wrote an article about me. I think what happened was, he was a fan but he writes for the style section, so his piece has to be a style piece. The article did not really touch on the political side to the strip. I started making the strip for a very particular reason, which is that it enraged me that nobody was mentioning the fact that we might be, by our bombing campaign, indirectly leading to mass starvation of thousands of innocent Afghans. That didn’t really make it into the New York Times piece or the Newsweek piece."

So it’s not solely about being afraid of anthrax packages, talking shit hiphop-style over the phone and getting drunk at work?

"I like to think the strip is not just, ‘Well here’s this guy, and [that] fall, when we’re all trying to sound brave, he was scared...and that’s the schtick.’ I did have this concern for these Afghans, and this sense that when so many Americans were really putting their best foot forward, there was still this level of private industry or the government who never are called upon to do that. So maybe it was...a vague sense of menace. Dick Cheney, you never get a sense he is just spontaneously gonna sacrifice. Maybe he is, I don’t know the guy. Kids in Omaha [were] breaking open their piggy banks and sending the change to New York City; you never get a sense that Kenneth Lay is gonna do something like that.

"More generally, it was so disruptive, you got this sense like, ‘Oh my God! America is about to totally start rocking!’ Everybody was gonna help out every day like they did after Sept. 11... You see these signs everywhere in New York: ‘Never Forget.’ People are dying to forget. They can’t forget fast enough! Everyone was working outside the framework but it felt like...whoosh...everything just fit back in and started going forward again until now it’s business as usual."

Maybe even worse than usual, depending on your politics?

"Yeah, fast-track trade negotiation, the USA Patriot Act, all this... I guess when you’re operating at that level you know how to use any situation to your tactical advantage. I can’t gauge the cynicism of people in this administration, I truly don’t think that they revel in 9/11 because it was gonna make it easier for them to get fast-track trade negotiation. But you can at least be open to the idea it doesn’t sit right. All these ominous, you know, ‘The USA Patriot Act,’ obviously it’s so–"

Orwellian?

"Right, that was one of the things that I liked to explore in the strip: language. ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’–even that is an awesome use of language."

So beneath the humor, was it intended as a Chomsky-esque exploration of doubletalk and foreign policy?

"It comes from a lefty political perspective, but if you consider concern about the starvation of hundreds of thousands as ‘lefty’...it’s not a radical position. I didn’t sit down one night and say, ‘How can I make a really effective antiwar tool?’ I was just pissed off that no one’s talking about this. For God’s sake, if we don’t help rebuild this time, we have no excuse. We played a hand in their last major conflict, with the Soviets. I didn’t know this until I started working with Adopt-A-Minefield–de-mining is the leading employer of Afghan males." (Rees is donating his profits from the book to Afghan land mine relief.)

"I just wanted to say things I thought were true," he continues. "I refuse to believe that being enraged that these guys at Enron, amidst all this national trauma, are still hard at work screwing their own employees...that is not a radical position. I’m not trying to say that the best means of government is government by committee at a national level and we should overthrow the state."

The story goes that part of GYWO’s genesis came when Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair announced the "death of irony." Rees explains:

"I hated the fact that these guys felt qualified to make these grand sweeping pronouncements, so I’ve been kind of hard on him. I wonder, maybe he was referring actually to a sense of promise, which was that now pop culture’s gonna become..."

Involved?

"Yeah, but he was wrong on that count as well. Vanity Fair did one issue with some firefighters on it, and now they’re back to all these idiot movie stars. I don’t expect Britney Spears to come out with this dark, moody album about America’s foreign policy. But it would be great! People ask me, ‘Bruce Springsteen put out this album about Sept. 11, isn’t that exploitive?’ and I think it’s awesome! I wish pop culture was about reality, and there is some, but there could be more. It would be so enriching. Who knows? I need my escapism. I can’t begrudge people having pop culture, but when you look around and see how much there is, and how crappy so much of it is, in the face of this terror atrocity... I would think it would lead to reinvestigation of what we are doing as a country."

Like switching from silly cartoons to social commentary?

"It was a weird exercise for me. I’d never made anything topical or political, and I felt, if there’s ever been a time when I should try it, it’s now. I’m in a lot of pain, I need to try to make something that speaks to that. People really took to it and I’m grateful for that."

I assume Rees has had his detractors like any satirist.

"The hate mail was truly never significant, and it always really surprised me. I thought at some point it would become so widely seen the balance would tip..."

You’d win vitriolic mention by the National Review?

"Oh, God, yes! My fantasy is to have them mention it. I would frame that, but they haven’t said anything, unfortunately."

After escaping Citicorp’s basement, Rees became a magazine factchecker, toiling substantially at Maxim. I ask about the influence of working for such a cheerleader of U.S. military action.

"Good God! I think it really just has to do with your penis. Their reaction was going to be really pro-military, because that’s much more..."

Phallic?

"Yeah, more exciting than being pro-diplomacy. There was an editorial meeting two days after Sept. 11 and [the senior editors] said, ‘Well, it seems so absurd to continue with what we do, but by God, it’s never been more important than now.’ Which somehow is what everybody in America managed to say about their stupid jobs. ‘So what is our reaction to this gonna be? We’re a pretty jingoistic magazine, so that’s gonna be our take.’

One of the pieces I had to check was ‘America’s Arsenal,’ why we are the best. I lobbied to have ‘cluster bomb’ taken off. I was like, ‘Guys...this is not a weapon to be proud of.’ Part of the reason I made GYWO–at that time, I was in an environment that was truly pro-war, at least officially. Everything was, ‘We’re gonna kick ass! We’re gonna bomb this country! They all have sex with camels...’ I was so saturated with that...it doesn’t seem like something you should revel in."

On the subject of spin and modern warfare, I mention the coverage of the first Gulf War.

"That war was such a scandal," Rees comments, "the way it played out, and the way the media was so excited to help out, because it was so beautiful. The little [logos] of ‘Operation Desert Storm,’ with the little tracking radar image."

A condition that persists in the ubiquitous "Countdown to Iraq" captions on tv news; you’d think we’ve already committed to invasion.

"It’s so tacky that we’ve lost any sense of sobriety about it. Maxim–the whole point of that magazine is to whip you into a frenzy. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a videogame or a model or a war. I [named] the comic, maybe not having to do with Maxim in particular, but...you know the phrase, ‘Get your freak on’ or ‘Get your drink on,’ something you’re gonna do and you’re so psyched to do it, and I wanted to play with that. ‘Get Your War On.’ It would be jarring: ‘Huh? Oh yeah, it’s a war.’ Is that something you wanna be so psyched about?"

When I ask him about future projects, Rees mentions some ambitions toward prose writing, and his band the Skeleton Killers, but mostly he seems content to remain in the present.

"The past two months, the whole thing has just been getting through the book tour, dealing with publishing the book. It’s been a great experience and my goal was just to survive it. I don’t have a master plan, unfortunately; I just made it to get all this stuff off my chest, and then it took off. It’s been this interesting yearlong detour, because the thing I really like to do is write music." />’s strength is its absolutely unfiltered reaction. "I didn’t have to go through an editor," Rees tells me. "I could make strips about something and post it immediately thereafter and in 48 hours it would be all over the world. I’m not the kind of person who used to get excited about how the Internet was gonna change everything, but in this instance I understand. It was truly something I was able to sneak in under the door. [People’s] reactions were strong, not because I was saying anything especially insightful, but because it was this little voice speaking against this mass wall of unstoppable rhetorical force that was being cast on us." He pauses, and adds, "But millions of people out there don’t have access to the Internet, so how effective is it really?"