GQ
Best Expletive-Laden Karate-Temple Book of 2003
Mike Watt
My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable...kicks like Cato. This time Rees explores martial arts--getting laughs from the human condition in a karate temple that's straight outt of a Saturday morning Hong Kong kung fu movie. Signature Rees dialogue like "Please talk some more shit so I can deliver your ass-kicking" had me rolling on the mat.


Seattle Weekly
Once in a while, unhinged profanity in the arts can be goddamn fucking beatific--this sentence being an obvious exception. His new minimalist comic collection, My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable (Riverhead, $10), places Rees alongside George Carlin, Casino, and South Park in the gutter guffaw pantheon. He employs crude cut-and-paste methods with about 10 different clip-art images of karate figures to tell a breezy, ironic saga of obnoxious temple fighters who, when not relishing "giving motherfuckers a free ride in an ambulance," are uproariously aware of their existential status as static cutouts. ("What the fuck?" one ponders. "I'm stuck in permanent kicking position!")... Ridiculously brilliant and innovative.


Chicago Reader
In Print: clip-art characters speak the motherfucking truth! by Seth Sanders
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?" In David Rees's My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable...the blustering fighters repeatedly get their asses kicked by shifts in the very fabric of their cartoon reality. Read


Maxim
You probably know David Rees from his hugely popular Get Your War On, the antiwar comic strip set in an office that no doubt found its way to your inbox days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Rees’ new book of “Crumbly Comics,” My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, pits clip art images of men in various karate poses using Rees’ brand of dry, caustic dialogue... While the visuals seem simple and easily tiresome (think South Park), Rees’ off-kilter humor keeps it interesting and fresh. Now, excuse us while we go remove some motherfuckers from their faces.


Colorado Springs Independent
Taking clip art to new heights of absurdity, Rees has somehow managed to make of really crappy computer-generated images of men in karate poses ridiculously hilarious...This is an adult comic book, and there are belly-busting amounts of unnecessary cussing in all the right places.


New York Press
Brooklyn's David Rees Still Has His War On by Philip Henken
My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable was the product of tedium (a temp job in a windowless basement at Citicorp, he reveals), an absurd postmodern mix of karate clip art, simple graphics and profanity that at first scanned as woefully stupid, but became progressively funnier as I turned the page... Read


Bold Type
In My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, the main characters are two clip-art karate fighters who do battle with each other and with a series of other unlikely adversaries... Their dialogue is equal parts Wu-Tang Clan and Iron Monkey. And somehow it's totally brilliant: hilarious, addictive, and revelatory. And it only gets better with rereading. Clearly there's some sort of crazy alchemy at work among these various ingredients, a crazy alchemy in the hands of a Mad Genius. [This piece also includes a great essay by Rees on the making of MNFTIU.] Read


Surgery of Modern Warfare
A Brief Interview about Swearing with David Rees by Amy Fusselman
"One thing I learned from rap and stand-up comedy is that curse words are a useful rhythmic elements. They can help the rhythmical flow of a line without necessarily adding any information." Read


New York Times
Like Dilbert, but Subversive and Online by John Leland
"A gusher of unprintable participles..." Read


More to come...for a complete list of David Rees media coverage, visit mnftiu.cc.