God, the Devil, and a Monkey first began as a side project of mine in the fall semester of 2002. I was getting a bit tired of The Anarchist, which was just one more college cartoon. I really wanted to do something that wasn't so generic. I got hooked into this idea of a guy with the devil as a roommate. Unlike any of my friends I like the movie Bedazzled, particularly the interaction between Elliot and the Devil. I played around with the idea a few months and mentioned it to a friend of mine and she said it needed a monkey. Less than a day later I had it. Simple. Man changed to God and I had God, the Devil, and a Monkey.

Now all I needed were the designs for the characters. This set me back quite a few months, since I wanted to work with a drawing style I hadn't done before. I already had The Anarchist in the newspaper, and if I was going to work on two comic strips, I didn't want them to look similar in any respect, aside from being professional looking. I went with a more primitive style than usual for me. Extremely simple in my opinion. I had been reading a lot of Pearls Before Swine at that time, and I really liked the simplicity of his characters. I'd also been fascinated with the bold lines in Samurai Jack and PowerPuff Girls. I know what you're thinking, but I got dragged to the movie and it's actually pretty funny. As far as I'm concerned you can't go wrong with anything by Genndy Tartakovsky.

A combination of various aspects of styles and artistic philosophies I liked lent itself to what you see now. I couldn't be happier with the way the characters turned out. God, the Devil, and a Monkey made its debut in April 2003 in "The Arkansas Traveler."