April 21, 2002

2:12 PM

"It was just something I did for myself, and I e-mailed the link to 10 friends that I didn't think would get offended," David Rees said. "It took off." Half a year later, the NYT gets its war on.
posted by muckster (13 comments total)

Good for the NYT. It just shows it is the newspaper of record. Eventually almost everything worth noting finds its way there.

With 5 million hits, press attention and calls from MTV, I hope David Rees strikes it big.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:24 PM on April 21, 2002

Or it could show that in the 21st century, it still takes the Times forever to notice something that thousands have already seen. Or both.
posted by owillis at 2:28 PM on April 21, 2002

I hope he makes lots of money. It's not profiting from war, it's being rewarded for speaking in a voice a lot of people needed to hear.
posted by joemaller at 2:29 PM on April 21, 2002

It's interesting that the article just doesn't seem to be able to process the fighting/filing strips that were a precursor -- the concept is maybe just too difficult to explain. It's the kind of humor that makes almost no sense at all when you try to summarize it.
posted by BT at 2:56 PM on April 21, 2002

It's easy to ignore the impact of insightful newspaper editors.

From the article: "The strip is something like "Dilbert" for people who drink and download pornography on the job, or at least bluster about it."

My response: Uh, 'like Dilbert'? As in, harmless sarcastic humour about office life?

From the headline: "Like 'Dilbert,' but Subversive and Online."

Ahh. Yep.
posted by Marquis at 3:27 PM on April 21, 2002

...spreading by word of e-mail alone, so that in its first two weeks it received five million hits from Web crawlers around the world.

Which is totally inaccurate. It spread by email and websites. My money's more on websites, too. Other than that, yay!
posted by RJ Reynolds at 3:50 PM on April 21, 2002

Yeah he didn't ever explain what the hell Voltron had to do with it.
posted by Settle at 4:04 PM on April 21, 2002

Did anyone else feel weird reading the story? I mean to me, the strips always seemed just another artifact of 'internet culture', you know just another sarcastic bastard. Like the guy making the strips was just another 'one of us'.

But the NYT article had this whole story about this guy. I don't know it was almost de personalizing, setting him out as some kind of genius or great person or something.

Well, who knows, it's cool this guy's getting famous and stuff. Good for him.
posted by delmoi at 4:07 PM on April 21, 2002 [1 favorite]

what is the community mefi login for nyt? I just killed all my cookies and lost it.
posted by Hankins at 5:02 PM on April 21, 2002

David Rees explains the motivation for his comics and how karate is like rapping.
posted by euphorb at 5:36 PM on April 21, 2002

If you like Rees' work and want him to stop having to count pennies to buy a cup of coffee, buy the "my new fighting technique is unstoppable" book. It's nearly as funny as "get your war on."
posted by dack at 5:59 PM on April 21, 2002

Hankins: it's easy to make your own new account, but if you're avoiding it for some reason, try ID: metafilter1 password: metafilter
posted by evanizer at 6:19 PM on April 21, 2002

Where have I seen those comics before?
posted by bondcliff at 7:16 AM on April 22, 2002