Chances are, if you had a computer with internet access in the last year, you've seen Get Your War On. The website containing the politically incendiary concoctions of Brooklyn artist David Rees hit us in places we didn't expect were targets in the first place. His wit was a broadsword through the funk of national tragedy and slowly and out loud we realized it might possibly be okay to laugh again. Not like we had a choice. Unlike most of the garbage that gets sent down the email daisy chain, GYWO was actually funny. Hilarious even. Unique and most desperately called for in a time when sadness and anger and despair had us numb. But the true beauty of the Get Your War On story isn't that it hoisted an obscure and struggling artist to international pseudo-celebdom. It's a story of the true power of expression, hidden destinies and apparently worthless corporate clip art. It's a story that showed us that sometimes, even when we don't mean to, we can make a difference.

At what point did you realize this was bigger than you thought it would be?

I guess it was a week or two after I first posted. I was over at a friend's house and he was showing me a bar graph charting its traffic and he said 'This is unbelievable, this has more hits than Citibank dotcom gets.' I was like 'Make it stop.' It started off as this personal private thing and the internet kinda took over and for a while it got really interesting. It got very public.

So you set it up on your own personal web site.

Yeah I had a web site and it was supposed to be a site for my Karate fighting technique comics and the filing technique comics. The war comics started because a couple of days after the bombing started, I was going to update my regular web site at two in the morning and it felt kind of stupid to just go about business as usual. So I wrote some satirical cartoons to get a bunch of stuff off my chest and then once I made the comics I decided to put them up on the internet so my friends could see them. They were on a back alley page. And it was that specific link to that page that got forwarded around.

I remember a really long, almost cryptic web address attached when I found it.

Yeah, I'm not very good at programming and I had some duplication in my address, which is a testament to its popularity since it wasn't easy to remember the address. It may have been ten times more popular if it was an easy to remember address.

Or that obscurity might have lent something to it too.

Actually you may be right, because I have never had much personal information on my web site. When I started getting feedback, that added to an overall sense of mystery. People would ask 'Who are you?' Are You American?'

They were presented in a very straightforward way too. I remember them in red, just stacked on top of each other. You carried some of that feel over to the book.

I didn't want it to feel like a typical comic anthology. I wanted to give it this sense, something like a memento... like something to be looked at in 40 years. I think that part of the reason people liked the comic is that it was this weird thing coming out of nowhere and the imagery was just clip art. I kind of like that, Let the work speak for itself.

Did you feel pressure to produce as the popularity grew?

Well I had posted the second page before it took off and then yeah, I did. I felt this tension over the past year between trying to continue this as a personal exercise, just trying to be true to myself and do what I want to do (even if I wanna have 'Voltron' show up to keep it from going stale) and the pressure to continue to put out strips. The best strips are where I can get back to the same feeling I had that first night; not worrying about who is gonna look at it or whether anyone else is gonna give a shit. You can tell when that's happened because there is this break in business as usual like the Voltron strips I really liked. Also when I made the more recent strips the so called 'Lost Strips from the 1980s' where the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein while he gasses his own people.

I don't really want to have a career as a political cartoonist. I do wanna continue to do things that are interesting to me. A lot of the way I work is to set up little rules for myself and turn it into a little game and try to work within those rules. The best strips for me are where I'm able to come up with a new way to see how they go against the tradition of Get Your War On if that doesn't sound to high falutin'. I don't want the project to become too predictable and stale. I think that's true of a lot of political cartoonists. You have an editor or you are part of a syndicate and you have to come out with a new cartoon every Monday. I think that is incredible, I really admire that, but it's not for me.

Is it harder to go with a three panel strip?

The format is the way it is because the night I started it I was imagining it appearing on a regular comics page in a newspaper. Like the Rex Morgan 'guys in suits' comics that I never even stopped to read as a little kid. I wanted them formatted like the classic three panel strip. At the time, they were almost like haiku they were so compact. The ideas were so strong that I really didn't need that much room to try to get across what I was saying. Now some of them are so fucking long winded, the speech bubbles are weighing down on the poor guy's head. I'm always happy to have this very limited framework or rules. Then you try that much harder to squeeze every last ounce of energy out of it.

You seem to go so far beyond what people consider politically correct, but you maintain this reverence, this respect for situations and people, like the passengers who rushed the cockpit. Did you set up boundaries with yourself?

Yes, totally. I don't wanna give the false impression that I am a totally cynical person who is doing it for shock value or to stick a thumb in the eye of America. The whole reason I started making the strip is that I do care about people. I wouldn't give a fuck about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan if I am not the type of person who worries about the most powerless person in the room.

I am not the person to make a joke about 3000 people dying on a Tuesday morning in Manhattan, cause it wasn't funny to me. It was fucking traumatic and depressing as hell. And I have no beef with people rushing the terrorists on a plane. They were so tough. I don't want people to think I am making fun of that guy who said 'Let's Roll.' That story is very moving and inspirational to me. The fact that those people took a vote on whether or not to rush the terrorists on a plane headed to their death. They engaged in participatory democracy. It gives me goose bumps to think about that. My parents raised me well, I care about justice and acting with character. When you say 'Let's Roll' it means something, but not when you appropriate that phrase. It sounded so lame coming out of George Bush's mouth. So stilted and so bad. So do I set any boundaries, is there anything I wouldn't make fun of? I don't think so, because my moral compass for the comic is no different from my own moral compass. There was one strip I didn't publish when they were deciding not to air Bin Laden's videotape because they thought it had secret messages in it. The strip dealt with how Osama said we would be attacked and we were, but when Bush says something you have no idea if it will happen or not. It wasn't that funny and I was already catching flak from people for comments like we should surrender. And people were taking that seriously and I was getting emails from people saying 'You pussy communist you're already ready to surrender.'

Do you get alot of angry response?

Not nearly as much as I thought I would.

What was the angry stuff about?

Some was just incoherent personal attacks against me. And a couple, the best ones, were where someone would have a specific criticism of a specific strip or the whole attitude. A lot of people wrote in and said, 'Look man, don't blame religion. Stalin killed plenty of people from within a Godless ideology.' I responded and some of them turned into a reasoned argument. I'd never had to deal with hate mail before. But I have noticed that if you get some email that says 'You are an asshole and I wish you had died on Sept 11th' and you write back and try to address their concerns, they either back off or apologize. It is so easy to fire off comments to an anonymous web site. When somebody writes you back and signs it with their name like I do; a lot of people are like 'Whoa, there is somebody there who actually read what I wrote.'

You seem to have grabbed the slang of 'Get Your ----- On' right before it became ripe.

I didn't have to think too long to come up with that title. I think 'Get your freak on' the song was already out there. Even before that, people within a certain demographic knew the phrase. I thought 'get your war on' was such an effective way to make the point. A lot of people were treating this as just another event that was about to happen. But it's a war. W.A.R. It's a war against terrorism. It's not a typical war, it's more a metaphysical war. It was a cool way to play up that a lot of people were not even criticizing this very important decision we had made to wage war in Afghanistan and more broadly against terrorism. It is still a war. If you knew enough about that phrase from hip-hop or whatever, it is just sort of jarring.

Most of these kids who grew up with that phrase also grew up during Desert Storm where 'getting your war on' only took a couple of months. Like a war is just a fad or a trend.

That's a really good point.

So the royalties from the book are going towards Adopt-A-Minefield?

Well with a book there are different types of money coming in. My author royalties, which is the money that would be coming to me through sales, all that money is going to go to Adopt-a-Minefield, an organization that removes mines in Afghanistan. Specifically to one group of 25 guys and their German Shepherd. They work in Afghanistan removing land mines. In addition to my royalties, Softskull - the publisher, is going to donate a portion of their royalties. The money will go to my manager and they will deduct their fee and then instead of writing a check to me they will write those checks to Adopt-a-Minefield.

We already raised $17,000 because I sold a limited edition of the book, signed and numbered from my web site. Everyone who bought that book got a letter from Adopt-a-Minefield telling them about the team and listing all the guy's names who worked on that team. It costs about $15,000 for one of these teams for a month. The leading legal employer of Afghans is de-mining. The place is fucking littered with land mines. They have been at war for some twenty years and everybody uses them. The Soviets used them, the Taliban used them, the Mujahadeen used them, the Northern Alliance uses them... everybody put down land mines. So removing them is the leading industry in Afghanistan. It costs about $3 to put a land mine in the ground and it costs almost $1000 to remove it.

The book tour is about Get your War On but also to tell people about Adopt-a-Minefield. I looked for a charity to donate the money from this book to and I thought about a September 11th charity, but there was a lot of money flowing to that already and I thought, well this book isn't really about the September 11th attacks, it's about the war on terrorism. So I found out about Adopt-a-Minefield and called to ask them if they could accept money to go to Afghanistan. It's worked out really well because I was really upset about a particular situation and I made these comics about it and through the comics I can raise money to ameliorate the situation and devote more money to it than certainly if I were to just donate some money.

So you are headed out on a book tour.

It starts at Harvard and then throughout New England. Then back to New York City for a Halloween thing after that is when it really starts going. Pennsylvania, DC, Virginia, North Carolina -- which is where I'm from -- and TX, then into Canada in January.

The Unitarian Church on Staten Island invited me to speak for a lecture series they had on the current state of America and my publisher said go for it. So I took the ferry over and when I got there they had me talk in their church with the audience sitting in pews and the average age was near 60 or 70. I said to myself, this is going to be a fucking disaster. So I said 'Listen everybody, you need to know that this comic is very profane and touching on some very touchy subjects.'

I read the first strip and one guy walked out. But the people who were there were really awesome. Middle-aged or elderly people who might not have really understood all the references but were so intrigued and were asking all these questions and laughing their asses off. So that experience was like 'God if these people were digging it I can't wait to get on the road.'

I'm also excited about the cause behind it. I'll be able to get the name out there. It may sound really corny but I had all this frustration and despair about what was going on on the other side of the planet but now I realize 'Holy Fuck; it is on the other side of the planet but I have a list of the names of the guys who are removing the land mines and we were able to raise money to help them.' So it was really interesting for me. To be able to get off my ass and set this thing up and low and behold it's gonna work.

Do you want to go over there at some point?

That would be interesting. The woman I was working with at Adopt-a-Minefield went over there to videotape the workers. She said it was incredible, the most beautiful place she had ever been. The landscape is really gorgeous with mountains and trees and stuff, set up against rusted out hulls of Soviet tanks that have been sitting for twenty years and grinding poverty. Refugee camps filled with thousands of people getting nothing to eat. So maybe I'll go over there some day but right now I am happy to just get the chance to travel around America, go to a bunch of places I have never been.

David Rees will be appearing at Chop Suey Books on Thur, Nov 7th from 7-9pm. He will be discussing his collection of Get Your War On (Soft Skull) and signing copies as well as talking about Adopt-a-Minefield and screening a 15-minute video shot in Afghanistan. Go to: www.getyourwaron.com.