It’s a half-assed Internet comic someone whipped off at his temp job. Two karate fighters–static, fake-looking clip-art figures–ponder the insane idea that they themselves could make up imaginary fighters to practice battle techniques that aren’t even real yet. “But dude, what if they turned real on your ass? Would they battle you?” On David Rees’s My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable (mnftiu.cc) Web site, begun in April 2001 and updated sporadically, the blustering fighters repeatedly get their asses kicked by shifts in the very fabric of their cartoon reality. While enduring a pounding cut and pasted from the second panel, the first pixelated fighter laments, “This shit is too deep for me to think about with your foot in my face.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Rees’s karate fighters exist in a constant state of agitation over who has the best fighting style and persona–an idea he got from reading Internet hip-hop sites, with their joyous, psychotic obsession with verbal technique. Yet in one strip the blowhards are thrown into total disarray by a dude whose fighting style is simply that he’s a see-through human circulatory system. When the fighters contemplate this ridiculously out-of-place image, they collapse in hysterical self-doubt. “I found that piece of clip art and it looked so tough,” says Rees, a New York temp worker who plays guitar in a band called the Skeleton Killers. “But I had the characters’ reaction be as normal as possible, like ‘What the fuck, I can’t believe this guy is just a circulatory system!’ I just sympathize with those guys so much, because if you were one of them you wouldn’t be clever or try to be hipper than it, you’d just be like ‘What the fuck!’–a lot of the reactions are totally heartfelt, like confusion and intimidation.”
By forgoing the dubious certainty of a commentator or political cartoonist, Rees managed to produce one of the few public responses that didn’t ring hollow: an urgent, nonstop conversation in which the generic but outspoken characters seemed genuinely worried about themselves and each other. He got something like five million hits the first week, and the comics were E-mailed around the world. People told him it was the first time they’d laughed since the attacks. Rees says that “since October, gradually the culture’s been opening up and you’re seeing more points of view, but one reason it got forwarded so much then was a lot of people didn’t know anyone else felt that way. People told me, ‘It makes me feel less alone and less afraid–it’s helping me get through this experience.’”
