Least I Could Do- The Pilot (Or, help a webcomic get made into a series and tell Teletoon to SHOVE IT!)

LOYAL MINIONS!!  I’m the Overlady, Kat Curtis, and this is my first post ’round these parts.  Nice to meet all of you, and I hope you’ll join my armies when I rule the entire galaxy one day.  Why should I rule the galaxy, you ask?  Well, I fully support naked ladies, I plan to have the entire world policed by superheroes instead of armies, government grants will be given to sequential artists, Comic Book Theory will be a mandatory class in highschool, and slimy television networks won’t be able to get away with stealing intellectual properties from creators.

The creator in question? Ryan Sohmer.

Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s the webcomics guru and the mastermind behind Blind Ferret Entertainment, as well as the genius writer of webcomics Gutters, Looking For Group, and Least I Could Do.

More after the jump. 

And it’s Least I Could Do that we’re going to focus on today. See, Sohmer has been apparently working with Teletoon for four years, trying to get a LICD cartoon off of the ground. And for webcomics fans, I don’t have to tell you why that would be awesome. LICD is a brilliantly written strip, beautifully illustrated by Lar De Souza. It focuses on Rayne, who is pretty much me, in dude form, and his group of friends. It’s an incredibly funny, no-holds-barred look at sex, relationships, and current events, with a healthy dose of pop culture thrown in. The dynamic between the characters is natural, incredibly well-written, insightful, and at times, even touching. (“That’s not a tear, I’ve just stubbed my toe” touching, not “stranger danger” touching.) Plus, there’s plenty of dick jokes for those of you who like that sort of thing. (which is… well… everybody.)

The formula works, and the strip is one of the most-read strips on the planet, and has even won a Shuster award. Seems like a brilliant thing to make into a cartoon, right? Perfect formula, right?

Well, here’s Ryan’s story, from his blog on LICD’s site:

For going on 4 years, I have been working hard to bring LICD to the small screen, via a traditionally 2D animated series. Working with Teletoon (the Canadian version of the Cartoon Network), everything was in place to get the series off the ground.

And that’s about the time things went to shite.

Could Noel be of African American descent? Maybe Mick should be middle eastern. How do you feel about setting the series in Toronto? Issa should be a native. All of the friends should live together? Rayne’s neice, Ashley, shouldn’t be in the show. Instead of sleeping with women, could Rayne date them casually? We’d like one of the characters to smoke a great deal of pot.

The list goes on.

Suffice it to say, I wasn’t about to let this series get bastardized into a watered-down shell of its former self. Thanking everyone for their time, I walked away from the deal and waited until the contract expired.

Cut to recently. It was brought to my attention that the kind folks at Teletoon took a lot of our hard work, both intellectual and art, and used it in one of their new series. Not only that, but they took our hard work and made a shitty series.

You can watch the shite in question here.

They took a wonderful series, ripped off the intellectual property of the artists behind it, and then turned it into derivative bullshit.

So what’s a webcomics artist to do? Well, if you’re Ryan Sohmer, you work on creating your own gorramned cartoon. Now, creating a cartoon series is a lot of work, and costs a LOT of money.

Here’s where you can help. Following that first link I posted, you can pledge cash to get the series made, and Mr. Sohmer will match your pledges dollar for dollar. And depending on how much you pledge, you get rewarded. Though we in the fan community all like to bitch- a lot– the only way we REALLY can make a change is with our pocketbooks. So pledge a little bit of your cash, help an awesome webseries get made, stick it to Teletoon (who really only produces crap these days, anyway), and make a difference, and you will earn a place in my regime when I take over the world.

Bites and bruises,
Kat