I should point out that most of my drawings you will be seeing on this site are over ten years old. Personally, I cringe whenever I look at them. I can do so much better now, but Joe wishes to show both the progression of the artist as well as the writer, so I will grin and bare it. The first book "An Apparition or Two" was created around 1993 or 1994, when Joe and I were just pups. We had met each other not too long ago through fellow Apparition artist Dar Parsons, and I was only supposed to provide some fill-in work on the project to help Dar along because of his tendency to draw really, really slowly. In all fairness Dar was in the middle of shooting his film short "Laugh A Little" which was consuming a lot of his time (the film went on to win best in the state of Indiana, by the way). Though to this day I still don't understand why it was so hard for him to produce at least a page or two a month for Joe, who was his best friend at the time. As it is I ended up illustrating nearly the entire book with Dar coming in at the end and providing some quick pictures that does not stand up at all to the quality of work in which he in capable. I know Joe was agitated with this hasty "I just want to get it over and done with" work, as was I, because I didn't think my own illustrations, which tended to border more on the comic-bookish in those days, gave the right feel to Joe's dark, almost dream-like prose. My work on the second book "In the Blackness I laugh" is much better, more in tune with Joe's writing--though I still have my misgivings with the finished work on my end there as well, but we'll get to that in due time.

--Blayac