The Fabler

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Being able to love your job is an important thing to Lar deSouza, artist of the popular webcomics Looking for Group and Least I Could Do.

DeSouza, who has been drawing professionally for over twenty years, (minus a break in the nineties when he took time off to raise his kids) found his passion for illustrating early. His goal out of high school was to find a program that would teach him to draw “anything, anytime, at the drop of a hat”. Consequently, he wound up going to Sheridan College in Ontario for illustration, finding that it fit the bill perfectly.

Since then, he built a career out of illustration, culminating in the past four years of steady collaboration with writer Ryan Sohmer on the aforementioned webcomics.

Says deSouza with a laugh; “They’re a lot of fun to work on, and as long as people are reading them we don’t have to get real jobs.”

A self-proclaimed ‘illustrator who specializes in cartoon caricature’, deSouza has earned ample praise for both. Last year, he and Sohmer won the Shuster Award for Best Webcomic Creative Team. In addition, he’s won numerous awards for his caricature work – including several from the National Caricaturist Network.

“My teachers at Sheridan didn’t care for cartoon or caricature work, so that was something I did for myself for fun,” says deSouza of his love affair with caricature, “then it was a long while later that someone said to me, ‘you know, people actually pay for this’.”

Well known caricature artists have gone a long way towards influencing the overall aesthetic  of deSouza’s style.

“I still remember seeing my first Al Hirschfeld (the great 20th century caricturist) in a book in the library. It was a broadway illustration of the Bernstein brothers or something, I can’t remember now exactly who they were. What I remember most was the curl, the line weight … I’m a real line junkie, for that reason. ”

Another influence on deSouza’s work comes, perhaps surprisingly, from  Jim Henson’s original Sesame Street Muppets. DeSouza drew inspiration not so much from the character designs themselves, but in the humour the Muppets were able to convey as they moved and interacted with each other.

“You’re a sponge as a kid – I just absorbed everything. The classic WB’s with Fritz Freling, Chuck Jones, and McKinson, Tex Avery, Beany and Cecil. Beany and Cecil’s the first cartoon I remember ever seeing. They’re all in there, and it’s impossible to say ‘this was my leader, this was my biggest inspiration’.”

These influences all played heavily into his later work in webcomics, where he would apply his artistic abilities towards actualizing the ideas of his friend and creative partner Ryan Sohmer.

DeSouza describes his longstanding friendship with Looking for Group co-creator  Sohmer as “kind of an internet romance”.

“Before we did Least I Could Do, he approached me via internet for another comic idea he had at the time called In Other News. He found me on the International Society of Caricature Art website, and emailed me a very professional contact letter with references to his entire body of work at the time. I got to read two or three years of this strangers work, which not only demonstrated a solid work ethic but also a sense of humor that I could really get behind and share.”

The duo made several attempts at syndication with In Other News, which was single-panel editorial style comic with a by line about some relevant happening the entertainment world, but it just never took off. Eventually the project was put on hiatus, conveniently around the same time that Chad Porter decided to stop illustrating Least I Could Do. Porter, the second artist to illustrate LICD after Trevor Adams, had been working on the daily webcomic with Sohmers for two years.

DeSouza, who was a long-time fan of Least I Could Do, didn’t want to let the opportunity slide to jump into another ongoing project with Sohmers.

“By this time I had been working with Ryan for three years,” says deSouza, “and he wound up becoming one of the best friends I’ve ever had. We’ve meshed so well in terms of comic sensibilities and timing, and it’s such a comfortable fit the way that we can challenge each other.”

Providing new challenges for each other is an important aspect of the pair’s working relationship, according to deSouza.  He explains that they continue to motivate each other by setting the bar higher and higher, each bringing out the best in the other.

Though this technique undoubtedly shows in the quality of their work, it does sometimes have its setbacks.

“We do butt heads from time to time,” admits deSouza, “but it always comes with a sense of, ‘we’re going to communicate through this because what we’re doing together is better than what we can do on our own’. Our friendship and work relationship is just too valuable to risk over a miscommunication in an  email.  Really, it’s a wonderful circumstance, and I’m very proud to be Ryan’s friend.”

Least I Could Do stars Rayne Summers, a self-styled Don Juan type with a superiority complex and a flair for pop culture. The strip chronicles his adventures in sexual promiscuity and the bizarre circumstances he finds himself in on an almost day-to-day basis. Needless to say, LICD is not geared towards children – but those demographics that do get the humour will find Rayne’s simple-minded narcissistic antics utterly hilarious. If you don’t, I feel pretty comfortable suggesting that you probably don’t have any sense of humor at all.

DeSouza and Sohmer continued producing six Least I Could Do comics a week for three years, releasing one for every day of the week excepting Sunday. Then in 2008, they introduced a Sunday strip called “Least I Could Do Beginnings”, which is a Calvin and Hobbes-esque look at Rayne’s childhood, done in a Sunday newspaper funnies format.

“Ryan had been trying to get me to do a Sunday comic for years now,” says deSouza, “I’ve been resistant just because I thought I should have a day off. He kept saying, ‘just hear me out, let me tell you the idea’, and I would tell him, ‘no, I don’t want to hear the idea!’ Then he told me, and it was, ‘damn! I love the idea.’”

A collected edition of the first 30 LICD Beginnings strips was released June 15 in hardcover format, and is currently available in limited supply over at the Least I Could Do store.

Of course, Least I Could Do isn’t the only well-known webcomic that deSouza and Sohmer collaborate on. The two co-created Looking For Group in 2006 as a fantasy-themed twice-a-week strip with characters based on the playable races in World of Warcraft.

The humor strip, which features characters as diverse as a sociopathic undead warlock named Richard, a naively conscientious Elf, and an unbearably cute bunny with an interesting secret, has earned them massive attention through the WoW and Stratics communities . That being said, Looking For Group can appeal to anyone -its unique blend of quirky, fantasy humor and compellingly epic plot arcs makes for a genuinely engaging read.

“The day to day dialogue is all Ryan, and I’m more involved in the broader long-term planning,” says deSouza, “Then I also have a very broad control over the visuals. So things I do with his suggestions in the script will often redefine his original ideas. The bunny, for example, was originally a throw-away. But I liked the bunny, so I kept drawing the bunny – being carried around with someone, or being in the background. Then when we needed a particular development to happen  later, we thought, ‘let’s use the bunny! It’s perfect!”

Looking For Group is published on Mondays and Thursdays, which gives deSouza just enough time to put together the extremely colorful, full page strips in between his work on Least I Could Do. According to deSouza, while LICD takes him 2-3 hours per strip, and LICD Beginnings takes around 4, Looking For Group usually takes from 8-12 hours to do one comic, spread out over a few days.

When asked if he ever played World of Warcraft himself, deSouza enjoys a hearty laugh.

“I sucked at Pong. That’s how old I am. I’ve never been good at videogames, so I never got into WoW. I’m an old school D&Der, that’s where my gaming inspiration comes from.”

For the past few years, fans of LFG have been anxiously waiting for news of the release of another project that deSouza and Sohmer have said is in the works – an animated Looking For Group feature film. The two have been actively working on it for some time now, even going so far as to release samples of the animation on YouTube. One of those, an extended musical number by the ethically-challenged warlock Richard, has hit over four million views.

“What I can tell you is, we didn’t think it would still be in the works at this point. We thought a couple years would be enough to really see it underway, but it was a much bigger dream than either of us anticipated. We had animators working for us, and tried to do the in-house quality control ourselves, but in the end we just couldn’t do it on our own as we had hoped.”

They have since found a Canadian production company to partner with on the effort, though at this point deSouza can’t mention any names. As a result of the project changing hands, deSouza says the new window on the release is another two to three years.

DeSouza and Sohmer will remain the co-art directors over the film, with the former also assuming main storyboarding duties.

At this point they are reluctant to give any hints about what to expect in the movie, though deSouza has said that Slaughter Your World will not be in the final product.

“It will still be a musical, with I think 7 to 9 musical numbers in the movie,” says deSouza, “I can also say it won’t all be parody, and while some of the story elements will be old territory to regular readers, there will definitely be some new stuff as well.”

Going forward, deSouza and Sohmer have been nominated again in this year’s Shuster Awards under the Webcomic category.  This year, they share the honor with such talent as Karl Kerschl (the Abominable Charles Christopher),  Michael Cho (Papercut), Kathryn and Stuart Immonen (Moving Pictures), and Ramon K. Perez (Kukuburi/Butternut Squash).

“I said to Ramon Perez last year, if volume counts for anything we’ve got this covered,” deSouza laughs, “I mean I would love to pull it off again – It’s a terrific honor, and to be honest ,the ego stroke makes me feel giddy like a schoolgirl. But we’re in great company here, and if we don’t get it, it’ll be because we lost to some great talent. We really are competing against the cream of the crop this year.”

For more from deSouza, he keeps a blog, an active twitter stream, and hosts a weekly Ustream feed where he fields questions from viewers and works on illustrations and caricatures live.