• GET YOUR WAR ON: An Evening with David Rees
presented by Hallwalls and Medaille College, at Hallwalls
Wednesday, January 22, 2003 at 8 p.m.
$5 general, $4 students/seniors/members, free to Medaille students

Hallwalls is excited to be hosting a personal appearance by on-line poltical 
strip cartoonist David Rees, one of the most original (not to mention 
funniest) political satirists working in any medium today. Indeed, with the 
nearly total abdication by mainstream media (including most daily editorial 
cartoonists) of any critical role in the face of rising war and 
homeland-security fever, alternative strip catoonists like Rees, Ted Rall, 
Tom Tomorrow, and a few others, provide among the few pockets of dissent. 
Rees is being sponsored in Buffalo by the Humanities Department and Creative 
Writing program of Medaille College.

In October 2001, as "Operation Enduring Freedom" began its mind-bending 
campaign of simultaneously bombing and making food drops in Afghanistan (a 
nation riddled with land mines), David Rees began a cartoon diary of sorts, 
registering with savage satire the outrages of American foreign policy, 
corporate culture, and the everyday inanities of the post - 9/11 world we 
are increasingly taking for granted. His Get Yor War On series, employing 
appropriaged public-domain clip-art figures, soon became a phenomenon, 
drawing some 25 million hits to his website, http://www.mnftiu.cc A 
published version of the strips through August 2002 was published recently 
by Soft Skull Books, and, from his humble beginnings as a Martha Stewart 
fact- checker, Rees has now garnered enough notoriety to have been covered 
recently in Newsweek. Rees will do a slide-presentation based on Get Your 
War On (which continues to run on his website) as well as discussing his 
efforts to promote awareness of the global landmine crisis. All Rees's 
royalties from Get Your War On are being donated to The Adopt-a-Minefield 
Campaign, which is endeavoring to help rid the world of its more than 70 
million landmines. "Illustrated with clip art of vacant office workers and 
narrated with a hip-hop-like cadence- 'Oh Yeah! Operation Enduring Freedom 
is in the house!' says a guy in one strip - GYWO conveys a hilariously 
deadpan fatalism while managing to provide a surprisingly articulate 
expression of our anxieties" (Newsweek).