“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.