In the dark, dismal days following September 11, former Boston resident David Rees’s online comic strip Get Your War On rendered with uncanny likeness the febrile despair that had settled over the land. A crude clip-art composition of obscenity-spitting, Jim Beam–imbibing cubicle dwellers who swap rants about everything from anthrax to dumb CNN.com polls, Get Your War On started as a form of quiet catharsis for the 30-year-old Brooklyn resident ( " I was at my wit’s end with the national dialogue " ). However, it quickly became a tremendously popular Web site (www.mnftiu.cc) that has logged more than 20 million hits to date.

This weekend, Rees — a lanky Oberlin grad who doesn’t consider himself a cartoonist ( " Comics for me have always kind of been a lark " ) — returns to Boston to read from Get Your War On (Soft Skull Press). The Phoenix recently spoke with him.

Q: You’ve gotten a lot of unexpected attention in the last year.

A: It’s been an interesting year. This strip started out as something I put on my Web site for myself. And then suddenly, I was getting hundreds of thousands of hits and e-mails from strangers. For me, the comics served as a journal or diary; I wasn’t thinking about how the public would respond. But then the public responded in droves.

One of the comments I got frequently was, " I didn’t know anyone else felt this way. This is the first thing I’ve seen that describes how I feel. " Or people saying, " I read your strip, and then I didn’t feel so alone. I’d been wondering, ‘Was I a bad American because I was fucking scared?’  "

Q: You’re donating all the proceeds of your book to Adopt-A-Minefield, a landmine-removal agency working there. How’d you choose it?

A: Frankly, I’m like every other American. I never gave a rat’s ass about Afghanistan until we were going to start dropping a shitload of ordnance on them. Then I started reading about how this was going to be a real humanitarian disaster because there were already thousands of Afghans on the brink of starvation. I knew that I wanted to donate the money to charity ... so I started thinking, " What was a charity that actually had a connection to the comic? " My favorite strip is the one where the guys are talking about Afghans trying to reach the food packages and getting their heads blown off by landmines. It made a lot of sense that I would give the money to a charity that removes landmines in Afghanistan.

But who does that? SuperFriends? I went on the Internet and found Adopt-A-Minefield. I called them up and said, " Hi. I want to put out this book, and I want to give the royalties to a landmine-relief agency. That’s you, right? " And the lady’s like, " Yeah, we remove landmines. What kind of book is this going to be? " I’d been hoping it wouldn’t come to that. " Well, it’s actually going to be this comic book. There’s these two guys that kind of sit around and talk on the phone about the War on Terrorism. "

She was like, " Oh, does it have a lot of cussing? " I said, " Yeah. " She said, " We love that here at the office. "

Q: Given that you managed to capture the post-9/11 despair while it was happening, what do you think of an album like Springsteen’s The Rising — a work that responds to 9/11 a year later?

A: In terms of people making albums or songs about September 11, I think it’s great. I wish more people did. At least then pop culture would be about something fucking real.

Q: The most arresting aspect of Get Your War On is the contrast between its bland clip art and piquant dialogue. How are you going to convey that dissimilarity in a reading?

A: I don’t know what it’s going to be like reading it in front of a crowd. The only time I ever read it out loud was on The Connection — because it was on public radio, I couldn’t even read the cusses. I had to say " freaking. "

David Rees will read from Get Your War On on Friday, October 25, at 7:30 p.m., at Harvard’s Sever Hall, Room 113, Cambridge, and on Saturday, October 26, at 6 p.m., at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline. Call (617) 566-6660.