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Get Your War on
Get Your War On
A first collection of the website cartoonist's observations on the war on terrorism and other contemporary issues critiques such subjects as the anthrax mailings, Enron, the Office for Homeland Security, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Original. 40,000 first printing.
100 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2002
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About the author
David Rees
90 books35 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
David Thomas Rees is a cartoonist and humorist whose best-known work combines bland clip art with outrageous "trash talk" to incongruous effect.
David Thomas Rees is a cartoonist and humorist whose best-known work combines bland clip art with outrageous "trash talk" to incongruous effect.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 20, 2010
Decided to go back and re-read these for the first time in several years and they're still as powerful/hilarious/depressing/relevant as ever. One of my favorite comic strips ever.
January 30, 2009
This book is like drinking the blood of a small child whose parents killed your ancestors. My heart weeps.
March 8, 2013
A series of strips in which office workers rant to each other about bin Laden, anthrax, suicide bombers, Enron, the war on terror, and the suspect motivation and methods of the post-9/11 American government.
The strips begin in October 2001 and run for about a year. At first they're all AMERICA YEAH!1!! ("If there's one thing I love to see, it's a huge f***in' SUV tooling through midtown Manhattan with an American flag flying half-mast on its antenna! What could be less French?!") By the second half of the book they're full-on snidely cynical. ("I wonder what would happen if you literally had to fill up your gas tank with the bones of killed and raped people in order to make your car run?")
A few of the strips suffer from the lack of context. There was a whole series with some "Under God!" thing going on that I didn't understand. But it was awesome when Voltron joined the cast, and the what-would-it-take-for-you-to-suicide-bomb-yourself run is hilarious.
Most of the book uses the same two pics of the same two guys talking on the phone over and over. The foreword draws some profound conclusion about it representing "the universal and the generic", about "the same poses being re-enacted without progress or relief". Maybe...I just thought it was damn neat how the author was able to suggest constant movement and interaction by simply flipping the panel and zooming in a little from time to time.
Oh, and anyone who gets squirrelly about naughty words shouldn't read this; their eyes would bleed and their brains would explode out their earholes. (Mom, that means you.)
The strips begin in October 2001 and run for about a year. At first they're all AMERICA YEAH!1!! ("If there's one thing I love to see, it's a huge f***in' SUV tooling through midtown Manhattan with an American flag flying half-mast on its antenna! What could be less French?!") By the second half of the book they're full-on snidely cynical. ("I wonder what would happen if you literally had to fill up your gas tank with the bones of killed and raped people in order to make your car run?")
A few of the strips suffer from the lack of context. There was a whole series with some "Under God!" thing going on that I didn't understand. But it was awesome when Voltron joined the cast, and the what-would-it-take-for-you-to-suicide-bomb-yourself run is hilarious.
Most of the book uses the same two pics of the same two guys talking on the phone over and over. The foreword draws some profound conclusion about it representing "the universal and the generic", about "the same poses being re-enacted without progress or relief". Maybe...I just thought it was damn neat how the author was able to suggest constant movement and interaction by simply flipping the panel and zooming in a little from time to time.
Oh, and anyone who gets squirrelly about naughty words shouldn't read this; their eyes would bleed and their brains would explode out their earholes. (Mom, that means you.)
April 20, 2008
Voltron is in this book, what more do u need to know?
May 23, 2017
Something just told me it was time to read this one again. Can't imagine what...
(Original review from LibraryThing, December 2, 2012):
If you want to know exactly how we all felt after the 9/11 attacks, read this book. I remember reading the strips when they were first posted online, and it was comforting to know all my confusing thoughts were not singularly my experience.
The way language was used in those days (much as it still is today), was meant to either psych us up for the coming war or psych us out that everything our government was doing was right and necessary for peace. This comic found a humorous approach to that use of language, which is what made it so great.
(Original review from LibraryThing, December 2, 2012):
If you want to know exactly how we all felt after the 9/11 attacks, read this book. I remember reading the strips when they were first posted online, and it was comforting to know all my confusing thoughts were not singularly my experience.
The way language was used in those days (much as it still is today), was meant to either psych us up for the coming war or psych us out that everything our government was doing was right and necessary for peace. This comic found a humorous approach to that use of language, which is what made it so great.
July 28, 2022
[•••] Low brow yet serious humor about 9/11. Sounds like a mess, but it pans out somehow. There is an authenticity to it. 21 years later, it’s also accrued genuine historical value, as these strips were originally published very close to the folds.
January 3, 2018
One of the few voices that made sense of things back then, and could admit to the horror and the absurdity of it all.
March 2, 2019
These were hilarious. Probably dated now.
July 22, 2013
No sooner had I finished the Complete Get Your War On than I turned right back around and used its opening section as a referent for another reading of this initial publication, the first year more or less of Rees' howl of rage. Nothing terrible was done to the strips to repurpose them for the complete collection: the broader space allowed for some other framing of the clip art around the dialog, occasionally (and mostly early on?) an interlocutor was changed.
Mostly what vanishes from this volume is a handful of Voltron/Homeland Security jokes and a lot of the Anger-at-God stuff which I suppose seemed a bit repetitive when looked at across the years. But the summer of '02 was a passionate time and bad things were getting much worse and it is mostly remarkable how the strip improved for commenting on how static things remained 3, 4, 5 years down the line from this initial volume. A lot of this volume concerns how ineffective the prosecution of the war is, but it is too immediate to get into the ineffective planning. there is a great deal about language, and the language about the language is not kind. Colson Whitehead has a very fine introduction which is at pains to remind us, and those of you posterity deems ready to live vicariously via comics, that language had gone mad and we made a lot of fun out of this horrific vocabulary that was given to us to make sense of events.
Mostly what vanishes from this volume is a handful of Voltron/Homeland Security jokes and a lot of the Anger-at-God stuff which I suppose seemed a bit repetitive when looked at across the years. But the summer of '02 was a passionate time and bad things were getting much worse and it is mostly remarkable how the strip improved for commenting on how static things remained 3, 4, 5 years down the line from this initial volume. A lot of this volume concerns how ineffective the prosecution of the war is, but it is too immediate to get into the ineffective planning. there is a great deal about language, and the language about the language is not kind. Colson Whitehead has a very fine introduction which is at pains to remind us, and those of you posterity deems ready to live vicariously via comics, that language had gone mad and we made a lot of fun out of this horrific vocabulary that was given to us to make sense of events.
May 24, 2007
Funny and awful at the same time.
June 6, 2007
I thought I loved this guy's stuff at first, but it got old really fast.
August 10, 2007
These very funny cartoons examine post-9/11 fear and anxiety. Very biting humor. Hilarious.
October 30, 2007
Some of the funniest shit I have ever read in my life. And politically spot-on.
October 30, 2007
hilarious
November 5, 2007
Made me cackle. When it wasn't freaking me out a little.
April 30, 2008
some of the funniest comics ever.
November 16, 2009
oh, 2003, those dark, dark times.
April 6, 2021
Hilarious!
September 30, 2008
hilarious!
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews