The earliest LeFever work was romanticized and certainly a place through which living, for the artist, was bearable. Much like the fairy tales of youth and the nobility of the heroic myth, LeFever found solace by creating his own world.

He illustrated for the gift industry for several years, volleying between the charm of cute sentiment, and the vehicle of satire. His satire, blanketed in anthropomorphism, was a sugar coated buffer making our ridiculous selves easier to swallow.

Thinking to be poignant with irony, LeFever lacked the tools for such expression and instead watched those early satirical images became popular commercially as icons for the times - that in itself, was an irony.