Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

internetworkers - Re: [internetworkers] Get Your Tour On

internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org

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

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Thomas Beckett <thomas AT tbeckett.com>
  • To: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] Get Your Tour On
  • Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 10:13:45 -0500

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






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page