Rees' Anti-War Comics Use Sarcasm, Obscenity, and Clip-Art

“Oh my God, this War on Terrorism is going to rule!” cartoonist David Rees mockingly declared in the inaugural edition of his comic strip, “Get Your War On,” less than a month after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Just a year earlier, Rees was working as a temp in the Harvard Planning and Real Estate office. But, thanks to Osama Bin Laden and the editors of Rolling Stone, Rees unexpectedly rode his new comic strip to underground cultural icon status.

Combining the obscenity of “South Park” and the sarcasm of “The Simpsons,” Rees has made his name by using the same two or three pieces of distinctive clip art for his visuals and referencing current events with a consistent, if formulaic style.

There are no characters in “Get Your War On”—just anonymous talking heads—and the pictures Rees uses seldom change from week to week. The punch lines are quick, the jokes sarcastic, and the humor based vaguely on the frequent linguistic absurdity of the Bush administration sloganeering. But with over 300 strips under his belt, Rees has gotten somewhat tired of his flagship creation, and if it weren’t a sure reliable outlet for his politics, he might have moved on by now.

FOUR MORE YEARS

In fact, Rees tried to hang the strip up back in 2004, optimistically telling his editors at Rolling Stone that he would discontinue “Get Your War On” if John F. Kerry managed to bump President George W. Bush out of the White House in November. The editor, who’d been trying to get Rees to branch out and write some actual articles for the magazine anyway, agreed to the deal, and the fate of the cartoon strip was thrown to the hands of the voters.

Rees never got to deliver on his promise, of course, and last Friday, at a reading and book signing in Boylston Hall sponsored by the Harvard Advocate, he admitted to a captivated audience that he was in the midst of a “professional crisis.” To raucous laughter and applause, Rees told his audience that he was probably about as bummed out about having to do another four years of “Get Your War On” as Bush was about having to serve another term. Rees spoke briefly about the history of his comic strip before reading some of his favorite panels from the last few years, reminding the audience of the historical context behind each one.

After showcasing some of his older work, Rees read from the first set of “Get Your War On” strips he ever published, taking aim at Bush’s war on terror.

“Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared the War on Drugs, and now you can’t buy drugs anymore? It’ll be just like that!” he said.

The strip doesn’t stop at Bush, either—it also makes fun of his cabinet, and most of all, his supporters.

“Can’t we just build a fucking bomb the size of the earth and cut a hole in the middle in the shape of The United States?” asks one of the two men in a strip from Nov. 8, 2001. “Drop the motherfucker around us and take care of business once and for all?”

That panel drew a representative reaction from his readers, Rees told his audience in Boylston, with the fans on the Left calling it a “great critique of America’s foreign policy” and the people on the Right saying “‘Fuck yeah! A bomb the size of the earth!’”

A MANDATE OF HIS OWN

From the very beginning of “Get Your War On,” when Rees didn’t even think he had an audience, he was merciless in his mockery. Thanks to the visceral outrage emanating from every panel, the strip managed to tap into a well of liberal anger that propelled it to international acclaim. Visually primitive but absolutely fearless in its incisive political bite, “Get Your War On” quickly became an internet phenomenon and Rees joined the ranks of the brave few media personas who were willing to poke fun at the freshly wounded America.

The editors of Rolling Stone prodded Rees to take on new writing projects. But in an interview with The Crimson, Rees said his efforts to branch out have so far been uniformly stillborn. Three years after Bush first got his war on, Rees was getting ready to try his hand at something new.

But Rees says the election results gave him a “mandate” to keep drawing, even though he’s not sure he can muster up another four years of the strip. The end of the Bush administration would serve as a good occasion to stop, he figured, and “Get Your War On” could forever stand as a document of the war on terrorism as it was carried out by its founding fathers.

Today, Rees still posts new installments to his personal website on a weekly basis alongside a few other comics he’d started working on in the pre-Sept. 11 world. “Professional crisis” or not, Rees has been hugely successful for an independent cartoonist, and once his flagship strip became syndicated, published, and distributed nationwide, he was finally making a living off of his art.

FROM ALLSTON TO ALL-STAR

It’s a luxury he couldn’t afford when he was living in Boston, working various temp jobs at preschools, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and finally at Harvard Planning and Real Estate, where he was an assistant to the chief financial officer.

“They were busy buying up all of Allston,” Rees said last Friday. “I had just moved from Allston so it was really bittersweet to see these people planning the chess board of taking over this great neighborhood.”

Rees moved to the Boston area in 1994 after graduating from Oberlin College. When he wasn’t working odd jobs for a temp agency, he spent his six years here working on early versions of his current comic strips. At that point, he hadn’t really touched on politics in his artwork—his big projects were “My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable,” a cartoon about ninjas who do nothing but yell at each other and make threats, and its office humor spin-off, “My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable.” Both were based largely on one-liners, and they employed the same clipart gag that made “Get Your War On” so recognizable.

Rees moved to Brooklyn in 2000, where he continued drawing and trying to sell homemade compilations of his strips. He still writes updates for both original comics to this day, and he has added a new, religiously-themed absurdist cartoon called “Adventures of Confessions of Saint Augustine Bear” about a bison, a bear, and a hunter obsessed with killing them.

St. Augustine’s Confessions, the canonical fifth century work celebrating Christianity, “is like the most incredibly awesome book,” he told the audience last Friday, explaining the strip’s inspiration. “So well written. You think Larry David is self loathing? He doesn’t have shit on St. Augustine.”

Rees wrapped up his presentation with a serious talk about landmines in Afghanistan—the issue that got him mad enough to start drawing “Get Your War On” in the first place. He showed the audience a clip of a mine expert locating and defusing a bomb in an Afghan desert, and promoted the anti-landmine charity to which he donates much of his proceeds.

He concluded his talk by telling the audience not to be embarrassed by their elite status as Harvard students. “If ‘elitist’ just means ‘not the dumbest motherfucker in the room,’ I’ll be an elitist,” he said, to loud cheering.

With a book deal, a blank check from the editors of Rolling Stone to write whatever he wants, and a political mind to rival Jon Stewart’s, Rees can most definitely count himself among the elite of the underground humor world. His strips, though somewhat tired in their old age, still manage to capture the same fury that made his first ones so successful.

No matter where he goes from here, Rees has already left his mark on the political humor genre, pushing its boundaries further than anyone before him, and ridiculing his targets with a poison unmatched by any of his competitors.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.