Get Your War On

From Booklist
About a month after 9/11, stiff little drawings of office workers talking on the phone about the developing war on terrorism appeared on Rees' Web site. They have proliferated since into a bitterly funny running commentary on what Rees obviously considers a profound waste of the human spirit, not to mention personnel, materiel, and money. The drawings are clip-art figures--the same handful used over and over, cropped, enlarged, and diminished--and they look eminently bland and middle-of-the-road, not a boat-rocking bunch. What Rees has coming out of their mouths, however, couldn't contrast more starkly: slash-and-burn cynicism, frothing with anger and fear, liberally peppered with the f-word, especially in participial form; in short, the kind of impotent, resentful, but intelligent bile hip youngsters might spout. The sheer incongruity of pictures and text provokes laughter, and references to trashy pop culture keep it coming. Rees' conceit that straight-arrow, would-be patriotic Americans are actually profoundly unnerved by Bush-administration policies as well as lethal fanaticism, however, ensures that one's laughter is satiric. Very smart protest stuff. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Combining the wit of Doonesbury, the profane wisdom of South Park, and the office drone anxieties of Dilbert with the current-events-skewering savvy of Tom Tomorrow, Get Your War On critiques the government’s ambiguous war on terrorism to reveal a surprisingly wide spectrum of public opinion. Since the strip’s initial appearance, Rees’s working stiffs have lambasted everything from the anthrax scare and the Enron debacle to the Office for Homeland Security and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, bravely giving voice to a grieving, angry, and confused citizenry. Rees’s popular website, getyourwaron.com, has received over 8 million hits and has been featured in The New York Times, The Times (London), and LA Weekly, and royalties from this book will be donated to landmine relief efforts in Afghanistan.


Download Description
Combining the wit of Doonesbury, the profane wisdom of South Park, and the office drone anxieties of Dilbert with the current-events-skewering savvy of Tom Tomorrow, Get Your War On critiques the government's ambiguous war on terrorism to reveal a surprisingly wide spectrum of public opinion. Since the strip's initial appearance, Rees's working stiffs have lambasted everything from the anthrax scare and the Enron debacle to the Office for Homeland Security and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, bravely giving voice to a grieving, angry, and confused citizenry. Rees's popular website, getyourwaron.com, has received over 8 million hits and has been featured in The New York Times, The Times (London), and LA Weekly, and royalties from this book will be donated to landmine relief efforts in Afghanistan.


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Office workers with razor-sharp cheekbones, rep ties, and banker pens in David Rees's comic-strip collection Get Your War On (forthcoming from Soft Skull Press) start their frame-to-frame phone conversations with lines like, "Hey buddy. How are you enduring your freedom?" First posted last October at www.mnftiu.cc, this strip finds exclamation-happy biz-school Everypeople swearing and boozing their way through the chaotic national events of the past year, with reactions ranging from calm ("I'm a little confused. Are U.S. citizens allowed to kill suspected terrorists now?") to excitable ("I want all my Americans who think this is our finest hour to just throw your hands in the air!").( Dana Goodyear)


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