Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

Article in yesterday's N&O:

http://www.newsobserver.com/front/Features/story/1892654p-1878722c.html

At a fast clip

David Rees' online strips have been collected in book form, and the 
creator is touring to promote sales.

DETAILS

WHO: Comic strip creator David Rees.

WHERE: Manning Hall, room 209, at UNC-Chapel Hill.

WHEN: Friday at 7 p.m.

COST: Free.

CALL: Internationalist Books at 942-1740.

By G.D. GEARINO, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL -- Welcome to David Rees' world, a bizarre and constricted 
place where comic-strip characters communicate almost exclusively by 
phone and a pair of office workers can have this sort of post-9/11 
conversation:

Woman: "I'm a little confused. Are U.S. citizens allowed to kill 
suspected terrorists now?"

Man: "I think so. But you have to be really, really sure the person is a 
suspected terrorist! So be super-double sure they make you nervous!"

Woman: "Well, this dude standing by my desk is wearing a really [bad] 
jacket -- can I cap him?"

In this workplace, the War on Terror is the prime focus of conversation, 
with a little corporate greed thrown in for seasoning. One day, a cube 
farmer will note, "Ha! A [expletive deleted] white kid joined the 
Taliban! What the heck is that? He must have listened to a lot of 
Marilyn Manson!"

Another day, somebody will declare, "If there's one thing I love to see, 
it's a huge [expletive deleted] SUV tooling through midtown Manhattan 
with an American flag flying half-mast on its antenna. What could be 
less French?"

It's a sardonic place, this comic-strip world of Rees'. And the people 
there are really, really profane.

Rees is a 30-year-old Chapel Hill native who, in the space of a few 
months, rocketed from obscurity to cult fame at warp speed. The Web site 
(www.mnftiu.cc) featuring his online cartoon strip, "Get Your War On," 
has had 25 million hits in the past year, according to Newsweek 
magazine. A collection of the strips has been recently published in book 
form, and Rees is now launched on a cross-country book tour (he'll be in 
Chapel Hill on Friday). He has a manager in Hollywood sorting through 
offers. By all the available evidence, Rees seems poised for a breakout.

But for the moment, he's jobless and hasn't made a dime from the book. 
Nor will he ever: Rees has pledged his royalties to an organization that 
clears land mines from the countryside in war-torn countries.

Plus, the profanity in the strip distresses his mother.

He didn't learn that language at home, says Peg Rees, who still lives in 
Chapel Hill: "They are not his everyday words." Still, she's 
button-popping proud of her son, and the fact that he's giving away his 
royalties gives her the license to shamelessly prod friends, relatives 
and neighbors to buy the book. After all, it's for a good cause.

Rees -- whose father, Philip, now retired, was the art librarian at the 
University of North Carolina -- attended Chapel Hill High School before 
leaving for Oberlin College in Ohio, where he collected a degree in 
philosophy. After finding his way to New York, Rees became a freelance 
magazine researcher, working first for Maxim, a publication pitched to 
readers with frat-boy sensibilities, then later for Maxim's lifestyle 
opposite -- Martha Stewart Living.

All the while, however, Rees was creating comics on the sly at work. 
Eventually, he had enough work in hand to create two self-published 
comic books: "My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable" carried a 
martial arts theme, while "My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable" was 
set in an office. What they had in common was clip art and profanity.

In the publishing world, "clip art" are generic, noncopyrighted drawings 
that can be used for any purpose but are mostly found in advertisements. 
Rees had long been a doodler, yet he used clip art in his comics because 
it was faster than drawing -- and he wasn't being paid to doodle.

The profanity? It was just a surreal touch, Rees explains. "It becomes 
absurd, then annoying, then sort of hysterical," he says.

The two comics provided Rees a minor bit of underground fame. But more 
important, they helped him refine a graphic technique that was put to a 
much higher-profile use after 9/11.

"Get Your War On" was born in October 2001, when the United States began 
military action in Afghanistan. The strip, Rees says, was rooted in his 
"frustration and anxiety not only about what happened on Sept. 11, but 
what was going to happen in Afghanistan" -- namely, the possibility of 
widespread civilian deaths.

But the strip eventually took a wider view. Working with the same 
half-dozen pieces of clip art, all of which showed office workers on the 
phone or sitting around a table, Rees created strips in which people 
sardonically second-guess the government's Middle East policy ("I heard 
that Bush is going to force all the Canadians into refugee camps, then 
turn their country over to the Palestinians. That should solve 
everything!); offer sarcastic approval of carnage ("True, things do get 
damn peaceful in a town after Sharon rolls on through. Oh, wait, yeah -- 
it's so peaceful because everything's been completely [expletive 
deleted] destroyed!"); and take on a few sacred cows ("'Let's Roll?' I 
thought we'd been Rolling for a month! Where the [expletive deleted] are 
we Rolling to now?")

Rees doesn't observe a regular production schedule. He draws a strip and 
posts it online when the spirit moves him. Each strip is dated, and 
together the collection forms a sort of road map of Rees' attitude about 
the world on any given day. Mostly, he's skeptical about the government, 
but there's a subtle undercurrent of patriotism. For instance, the strip 
in which a character expresses delight in the sight of an SUV in 
Manhattan came when "I was kind of annoyed with the French," Rees says.

A profile of Rees in the New York Times in April brought attention from 
book publishers. He agreed to a deal with a small, Brooklyn-based 
company, but insisted that his share of the proceeds go to the Mine 
Detection & Dog Center Team #5, a group of 24 people and four German 
shepherds who clear mines in western Afghanistan.

But Rees isn't a serial philanthropist. When he strikes his next deal -- 
which will likely be lucrative -- "I'm definitely keeping the money," he 
says. "I'm not in the creative arts to stay broke and hungry."

© Copyright 2002, The News & Observer Publishing Company.
This article reprinted in full without permission for the purposes of 
discussion and review, as permitted by Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright 
Act of 1976.

David Mann wrote:
> Not sure if this had been posted but I just found out about it and figured 
> I would push it along: 
>
> Get Your War On National Tour 2002
> Sponsored by Soft Skull Press. 
>
> Friday, November 8 
> Chapel Hill, NC 
> University of North Carolina 
> Manning Hall, Room 209 
> 7:00PM 
> Sponsored by The Internationalist Bookstore 
>
> My New Fighting Technique:
> http://www.mnftiu.cc
>
> Get Your Tour On:
> http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/events.html
>
> My New Filing Technique:
> http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/filing.html
>
> -- Dave