I met an author named Darby S in high school, probably around 2014-2015. By then, he'd already been a published author and gathered a notable following. In the years following, he's worked on a two stories I have some involvement in to some extent: The Keymaster & Gerald.

The Keymaster  was originally meant to be a comic before Darby began writing it in a horror novel format. Around 2017, I volunteered to be the illustrator. Darby and I shared a liking to Junji Ito's manga, serving as inspiration; for me specifically, it was the visuals. I wanted to recreate the sense of suspense and horror that Ito put in every panel, though of course I could never recreate his intense and horrific art style. I had drawn nine panels in a 3x3 grid-like format, and while Darby was impressed and looked to the future of the illustration, the format didn't grow on me, so I wanted to start over. Some stagnation, laziness, and a lack of discipline later, and aside from an unfinished character sheet and some other bits and pieces, I have next to nothing to show in bringing visual life to The Keymaster.

Gerald began as a webcomic written and illustrated by Darby himself. He said himself that he was no visual artist and from what I remember, drawn completely on his own phone. I took a like to the webcomic and despite my lack of work for The Keymaster, I asked if I could redraw the webcomic, in the same vein that Yusuke Murata drew the manga for ONE's One Punch Man webcomic. I wanted to use this an opportunity to work on composition and paneling after my failure of The Keymaster's beginning visuals. Gerald was intended to be drawn with a much simpler style that I instantly fell in love with, and I wanted to retain the art style of the characters, yet have them placed in a much more realistic world setting. I initially began redrawing each panel of Gerald before scrapping what work I had done since I noticed I hadn't changed anything in terms of the panels' compositions. I opted to begin anew and, with Darby's input, drew the main characters (so far) fully realized as I had done in middle school with my stick figure characters into actual people, in an attempt to insert flashback scenes of sorts to help the narrative just a bit. So far, I only have the one character sheet of the main characters fully realized, and sketches of the first few panels of Gerald fitting on one giant sized paper.