But plenty of people know how to find Rees now. During the last year, his site, mnftiu.cc, got 25 million hits; now Soft Skull Press is publishing a “GYWO” book, with 16 new pages of work. Rees began posting “GYWO” on Oct. 9, 2001, two days after the bombing of Afghanistan began. “People were exchanging nothing but conversations about how uptight we were and how nervous we were every time a plane flew over,” says Rees, 30, who also does a comic featuring karate fighters. “I went online searching for some kind of humor about this horrendous situation. Nobody seemed to be digging, trying to dredge up all these feelings.” Rees had serious anger issues. In the first installment, a cubicle drone fingering a primitive keyboard says, “You know what I love? I love how we’re dropping food aid packages into a country that’s one big f–ing minefield! That’s good!” (The strip is not for kids, or adults who support George W. Bush.) He sent a link to 10 friends, who e-mailed it to 10 more and so on. Most of the response he received came from Gen Y, which had never confronted fear of this magnitude. “One of the e-mails I’d get was, ‘Oh my God, me and my friends thought we were the only people thinking this way’,” Rees says. “It’s a great document of this period,” says Ted Rall, author of the graphic novel “To Afghanistan and Back.” “All of those weeping Statues of Liberty that people drew said, ‘America is sad.’ No s–t! Say something!”
That Rees found humor at the most humorless time isn’t surprising: he’s a quirky but thoughtful guy. He plays guitar for a rock band called The Skeleton Killers. He solicited money for “GYWO” only so he could buy a seersucker suit for his wedding. He and his now wife, Sarah, ran off to the Candlelight Chapel in Las Vegas in July. “After we got married, we went to this free, live big-band dance in the Stardust Casino,” she e-mails. And then there’s his gig at Martha Stewart. Rees temps because, well, he needs the cash. He’s donating his proceeds to Adopt-A-Minefield. “I don’t want to start asking for money,” he says. “It just seems a little mercenary.”
But not everybody appreciates his efforts. “This middle-aged woman wrote me because there was one strip which was obnoxious about religion. She thought I was a communist. We were going at it a little while,” Rees says. “It ended with this corny all-American thing where we all agreed to disagree.” Not surprisingly, antiwar cynicism entertained liberals more. But some, like The Village Voice, didn’t know how far out there he was. “They’re like, ‘We don’t know who you are, but we’re The Village Voice. We’d love to run your comic.’ A day goes by. They write back, ‘Perhaps you’d like to know who we are. We are a New York-based weekly. We are very popular’.” Now, somehow, so is David Rees.
