Drawing on irony and humor

It was three weeks after Sept. 11, and David Rees was sitting at his computer feeling “insignificant and stupid.” The 29-year-old New York City temp worker was about to be laid off, dust from the World Trade Center buildings was still swirling in the air, and the U.S. was just starting to drop bombs in Afghanistan.

Times were strange. Rees felt strange, so he channeled his disillusionment into “Get Your War On,” a searingly witty online comic strip bristling with irreverence and a brutally honest point of view about what was going on.

“Oh my God, this War on Terrorism is gonna rule!” a bespectacled office worker tells a friend in Rees’ first strip. “I can’t wait until the war is over and there’s no more terrorism!”

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

Rees’ first posting was Oct. 9, 2001, when American flags were flying from nearly every car, home and high-rise in an unbridled display of patriotism. Yet many people were confused, scared, uneasy. Rees’ comic struck a nerve.

Two weeks after posting it and sending the link to some friends, the “Get Your War On” Web page (www.mnftiu.net) had gotten 5 million hits. It has received 20 million more since then. This month, Soft Skull Press is publishing the comic strip series as a book.

“No one was really talking about how horrible it was about to get in Afghanistan,” says Rees, who continues to update the site every few weeks with new panels. “I wanted to make jokes that would churn up that anxiety and try to provoke a really serious human response to the complexity of the situation.”

And churn it did, prompting about 1,500 e-mails from readers. Most have been from fans, praising Rees for helping them cope with what continues to be an exceptionally odd and difficult time. Some have been from readers accusing him of being anti-American. There are even occasional death threats -- all because Rees spoke out at a time when many were too afraid to give voice to their anger and confusion.

Much of Rees’ inspiration came from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who, shortly after 9/11, proclaimed that irony was dead.

“It ticked me off that these cultural elite were so eager to make pronouncements about the future of American culture when the dust, literally, hadn’t even settled,” says Rees, who holds a philosophy degree from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. “It seemed snobby and ignoring the human capacity to ... use humor as a resistance to horror.”

Rees believed in the power of pop culture to respond to crisis. He grew up listening to the Minutemen, an L.A. punk band whose music was infused with political irony. He watched comedians like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, who used personal traumas to make light of dark situations.

Though he admired political artwork and satire, he had never tried it before and wasn’t sure his would work. He started with a telephone conversation he had with a friend while working as a fact checker for Maxim magazine, dropping expletive- and exclamation-heavy dialogue into bubbles floating over clip-art characters’ heads. The banal, black-and-white images of office workers accented the blunt and biting narrative to hilarious effect.

Rees had used clip art for a previous comic, a device he developed while working as a temp.

“There was nothing to do, but I couldn’t draw at my desk,” said Rees, who, despite the popularity of his comic, continues to temp today. Rees, who “just wanted to make jokes,” soon discovered that “with clip art, you could make the jokes come quicker.”

Nearly every page of “Get Your War On” is packed with off-color humor that can be both laugh-out-loud funny and gut-wrenchingly sick, like the strip he posted last November:

“Mommeeee! Why is this little boy all ... blown up and mutilated with no arms? Didn’t he get the dollar I sent him?” Or the panel he posted in March:

“How psyched is George W. Bush to defeat Saddam Hussein for his dad? George H.W. Bush is gonna be SO ... proud of his son! He’ll probably put Saddam’s death certificate on the fridge! I was a C student.”

In the book, each comic is marked with the date when Rees posted it on his site, making the series read like a diary of the last year’s events.

“I wanted it to be a token of the last year,” says Rees. “Something you could buy and tuck away for a really long time, then look at years later.”