David Rees is a tough artist to crack. Last Friday night at a reading sponsored by the Harvard Advocate he refused to be pigeonholed as a “political” cartoonist. But his newest series of cartoons transcends the conventional cynicism of Doonesbury or even those Boondocks kids to tap into a real, terrified American consciousness. Over the past year, in a country newly raw to terrorism and wartime brutality, the Get Your War On web-links hopped from cubicle to office to dormitory. Now Rees has a publisher, Soft Skull Press (run by Richard Nash ’92-’93), and a bound copy of his comic.
Maybe it’s the swearing that makes GYWO so immediately gratifying in these expletive-deserving times, when every television soundbite involves a new atrocity. Here’s some sample dialogue:
Man 1: If there’s one thing I love to see, it’s a huge fuckin’ SUV tooling through midtown Manhattan with an American flag flying half-mast on its antenna! What could be less French?
Man 2: That’s right! Supersize the grief! When we get our grief on, we grieve harder than anyone! Motherfuckers just can’t grieve like the USA!
Keep in mind that these conversationalists look like cartoon versions of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman (or, in the case of one recurring figure, Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney).
In other words, they resemble every middle-level office worker in America. With their striped ties and poofed hair, they fit a retro-Wall Street profile—probably because the images are obviously recycled from an old clip-art program of totally normal (that is, boring) office folks.
By rendering them always in the same red outlines, in the same positions, with the same plastered-on false smiles, Rees channels the numb fear of mass denial. In doing so he evokes a nation of terrified people eagerly complying with any policy that could potentially obliterate the original source of their fear. But their dialogue is anything but the party line:
Man 1: Aren’t you tired of all the newspaper photos of dead Afghan civilians and American stockbrokers holding their heads in their hands?
Man 2: People laugh at me for keeping my money in a tin bucket. But you know what? A big tin bucket is not going to lie to me about its financial performance!
Man 1: Is that because a big tin bucket doesn’t think it’s entitled to do whatever the hell it wants, just because its asinine peer group is running the country?
Artistically, Rees is doing something important here. He captures the quivering fear most people feel, on some level, about what sort of chaos may be escalating and who exactly is in charge.
Live and in person, though, Rees doesn’t really want to discuss his cleverness. He’d much rather talk about Adopt-a-Minefield, the charity that receives his royalties (and a portion of Soft Skull’s) for the bound version of GYWO. He showed the audience footage of Mine Detection & Dog Center #5 at work sniffing out and deactivating landmines, the fastest-growing industry in Afghanistan today.
Despite his seriously pissed cartoons, David Rees also doesn’t seem like someone who’d swear a whole lot in everyday life. He’s from the Midwest, speaks sincerely, grew up in a church-going family (his father calls My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, Rees’ previous comic series, “an obscenity”) and was genuinely pumped about the adjustable lectern in Sever 113. He’s lived in New York for a few years now, fact-checking for Martha Stewart and Maxim when he needs cash. He says that GYWO was written primarily to ease the confusion and anger he felt not after September 11, but after October 9, when President Bush unleashed the grief, declaring a “war on terrorism.”
Man 1: 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!
Man 2: I know! 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!
Man 1: Right! God, if only that War on Drugs hadn’t been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana right now!
Rees mentioned last Friday that he is, of course, all for ending terrorism; he just gets infuriated when people refuse to acknowledge that their compliance in this war means “the total ruination of millions of Afghan lives,” as one character in the book puts it. According to Rees, both America and al Qaeda are perpetrators of chaos, and to accept anything less would be hypocritical.
Stylistically, GYWO is closer to realism than to anything else, with its bloody descriptions of current events. But Rees retains the right to mix it up with utterly weird moments like the arrival of Voltron, the animated robot from a 1984 television series. Voltron, despite his size and fighting capacity, stands around as much at a loss as any of the other office workers, though at one point a security guard declares that he “looks foreign”; eventually he turns into a coat-rack, signifying that even the most surreal presences become habitual after enough exposure.
While many people were coming to terms with their place in the new world of last fall, Rees was reinventing irony as an emotionally charged device, a form of therapy both for himself and for thousands of other Americans who realized they had every right to feel anxious and confused. The book is most effective for expressing America’s maddened bewilderment, the very acknowledgment of which feels like an important step in the direction of comprehension.
So buy the book: at the very least, you’ll have deactivated some landmines.
