If you're not going to read anything else, here's the tl;dr version:
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Looking For Group, the fantasy comic that has been running since 2006, written by Ryan Sohmer and drawn by Lar deSouza. It follows Cale, an elf who wants nothing more in the world than to be a hero, and Richard, the undead warlock who finds that ambition… genuinely funny… and tags along anyway.
Over the years, it built an audience in the millions, a couple dozen books, 2 spin offs, 2 board games, an RPG and a few very popular youtube videos.
In 2023, for a myriad of reasons, both real and imagined, LFG ended.
But now?
We want to bring it back. And we’re not talking about some reprint, but a full retelling of the original story in a 2026 lens, with twenty years of practice behind it.
But we cannot do this without your help. This BackerKit project provides us with 2 important things:
1 - The funds to produce a year’s worth of comic pages, without relying on shitty crypto ads
2 - Proof that the LFG audience is still there, still active and wants to be a part in this next iteration.
This is the easy part to explain; we’re doing LFG.
20 years ago, Lar and Sohmer set out to tell a ridiculous story set in a ridiculous world, and despite that shaky premise, they succeeded, while Cale & Richard became worldwide phenomena. If you were cool and liked that sort of thing.
And now, in 2026, we’re going to be re-launching Looking For Group in webcomic form, publishing twice a week, on Mondays and Thursday.
What would you do, as a writer or an artist, if you had the chance to retell your greatest success?
Together, we’re going to find out.
But why a Reboot?
To properly explain, we need to go back, all the way to 2006 (Side note - Lar was still old in 2006).
After doing LICD for a few years at that point, quite successfully, Lar and I were in a little bit of demand for a variety of different projects. A lot of them we turned down but one piqued our interest:
A once a month webcomic, set in the World of Warcraft-adjacent universe. Comedy meets fantasy? What else could we have asked for?
Of course there were guidelines:
Cartoon violence was ok, but rated G outside of that.
Each and every page had to work as a standalone page, ie, each page needed to have a punchline.
The characters must look and share WoW archetypes and species.
Obviously over the years, we got out of the contract, made LFG our own and something very different than how it started. However, those guidelines (there were more, but I’m giving the big ones) were there for the first few years and they stuck.
I always felt limited in the stories I could tell, how I could tell them and the language I could use. When things would happen in the story that I wanted to push, I couldn’t, because if page 500 was a radically different tone and style than page 1, that would pop you right out of the world.
So why a reboot?
Well, if the original LFG is my The Hobbit, than this reboot is going to be my Lord of the Rings.
I want to tell a new story, with the characters we all love, but without the 15 years of boundaries and limits. I want modern dialect in a fantasy world. I want to tell adult stories with everything that goes with and not have a sponsor say;
“You can’t do that”.
The limits that are placed on you when 90% of your revenue comes through google adwords are stifling. And with this campaign, those limits are gone.
Lar and I are creating for you, and for us; the stories we always wanted to tell.
And just a confirmation, we won’t be retelling the same story, it will be all new, without the baggage.
I could keep going for another 3,000 words, but hopefully I’ve been able to express why we’re doing this, and why you should be a part of it.
We’re raising $104,000 to make a full year of new Looking For Group content. This is exactly what that money will be going towards:
104 brand-new LFG strips, twice a week, every week, for a year.
A complete retelling of the original story, redrawn and rewritten by the guy who’s been doing this stuff for twenty years now.
The crew behind every strip. Each one passes through several hands before it reaches you, and your pledge is what keeps those people working and putting food on
While the new pages will eventually find their way to LFG.co, backers of this project will get to see them a full month before the rest of the planet.
Ryan Sohmer - Writer + Co-Creator. Wrote Looking For Group across its original run and is missing it a fuckton. He wants to be back on it full-time, because it’s where he was supposed to be all along. Also, his OCD is kicking in and wants to fix past mistakes.
Lar deSouza - Artist + Co-Creator. Has drawn the comic for so long that he could have had a baby who is now able to drink. Lar is incredibly old, likes his nickname of ‘old man’ and never proofreads the shite Sohmer writes about him.
The crew. It takes a village to create and run LFG, and each page will pass through several hands-
We’re going to make this easy, because this campaign is really about bringing the comic back and we want to keep things as simple as possible.
For every $5,000 we go over the goal, we’ll do an animated short.
But, we’ll do it with you the community. You’ll see the scripts, review the storyboards, hear the audio and see the animation as it comes alive. You’ll even get to chime in with an opinion or two.
